Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014

by Andy Cox, Editor

  Time was running out.

  “What else did you find?”

  There were some books. Some paperbacks, but also a few of the showy hardcovers that Ettrick preferred for his Library. I hadn’t even looked at the titles, but the old man seemed happy enough.

  “There’s something more.”

  He looked up from riffling the pages of a Lonely Planet guide to Nova Scotia. “Something came back?”

  I nodded. “In the kitchen where I got the spices. A bubble had taken out part of the work surface, a slice of turf wedged into the hole in its place. Flowers and everything.” Trying not to remember the astringent scent of those flowers, the weird olive colour and silken texture of the grass. I reached into the pack one last time and extracted what I’d found.

  “Oh, my.” Ettrick peered at the object. “This is quite wonderful.”

  It was rare that anything but atmosphere came through from Elsewhere. Rarer still that it survived intact. Especially something this fragile.

  The object was like an odd combination of a tea pot and a large mug. It had a spout, and perpendicular to that jutted two handles. There was a lid too that reminded me of a cookie jar lid. The pot was constructed from glazed earthenware, yellow with a pattern of detailed but unfamiliar red flowers.

  Ettrick lifted the lid, sniffed cautiously. “Incredible,” he said, scraping at the inside and examining his fingernail. “I believe someone’s actually used this recently.”

  “Used it for what?”

  “For drinking out of. It’s a posset pot, of course.”

  He pounced on my mystification. “A posset pot,” Ettrick repeated, almost slow enough for sarcasm. “For the preparation and consummation of possets. Don’t you know what a posset is?”

  I was going to reply that I hadn’t a clue – Ettrick’s petty general knowledge oneupmanship had got tired months ago – but surprisingly the word rang a dull bell. Something I’d learned during my time at catering college. “It’s a kind of old fashioned drink isn’t it?”

  Ettrick nodded. “It was used as a cure for colds and the like, but it had no actual medicinal properties. The Eighteenth Century equivalent of comfort food. Hot milk curdled with booze, sometimes made into a custard with eggs, and flavoured with cinnamon, nutmeg, that sort of thing. You ate the gloop with a spoon, and drank the alcohol through the spout.”

  “But you said Eighteenth Century?”

  Ettrick nodded.

  “So what was anyone doing eating out of a three hundred year old antique?

  Ettrick twinkled. “This is no antique,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s more likely than—”

  “You don’t know,” I cut across him. “If you smelled the air when a bubble pops…” I waved any further discussion away, pointed at the little pan rattling away on the stove. “Kettle’s boiling.”

  He scurried to turn it off. We might have had a surfeit of water, but we couldn’t waste fuel. Even so, a good cuppa was the one luxury neither of us had been willing to relinquish just yet.

  We drank in silence. I stared at the map and the activity chart, aware that Ettrick was watching but really not in the mood. Conversation between us was limited at the best of times. It wasn’t as if we had much in common. One of us was an IT guy whose skills were so obsolete it wasn’t even funny. The other, a retired academic. One had a restlessness born of technology withdrawal. Even now, I still feel the phantom umbilical of the wired world. Ache for a Facebook update, a tweet, a minute of Grand Theft Auto. Ettrick just got happier the more books he could add to his shelves.

  One of us had been a virtual shut-in for years. The only thing he missed about the world was that Tesco didn’t deliver any more.

  The other missed his friends. His family.

  Karen went right at the start of it all. She’d dawdled to look in the window of a Byres Road estate agent. I’d turned, laughing at her dogged determination to find something we could afford, walked back towards her. And then she was in a bubble, surprised, astonished, beautiful in the sun-shimmered construct like Glinda, the Good Witch of the Fucking North. She’d started to come out, an arm, a shoulder emerging, but she was too slow. The bubble steeled fast. I hadn’t a clue then. If I’d kept my head there might have been time to pull her all the way out, but I panicked, pushed her back in. Surrendered her to Elsewhere.

  “The bubbles are definitely getting less frequent,” I said at length.

  “Are you sure?”

  I shrugged. “The ones I see anyway. There are more singletons, not so many clusters.” I took a breath. “And the majority bring high air.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  It was as logical as I could make it. When the air was frigid, odourless, it made sense that it came from higher in the atmosphere. Much too high. When the air was warm and spiced, it came from close to the ground, to trees and grass and earth, but those occasions, like the bubbles themselves, were getting rarer.

  “Dinner, then?” I said, and the worry eased from the corners of Ettrick’s mouth.

  “I dug up a shaw of tatties,” he said proudly.

  “Better get scrubbing then.” I grabbed a carver from the knife block and the pigeons from the table. “And I mean scrubbing, not peeling. We can’t afford to waste the nutrition.”

  The sun was pinking and peaching the high freckles of cirrus, the evening air cool by the time I finished with the birds. I stretched stiffly and looked along the backs of the tenements, the reflecting windows afire. A peaceful apocalypse.

  In the kitchen, I pan fried the pigeons with thyme and garlic, a dribble of precious oil. The potatoes I dusted with dried rosemary. It tasted about as good as anything we’d eaten in months.

  Afterwards, Ettrick made himself scarce. I heard books being slipped from shelves, riffled through, pushed emphatically back in place. I let out a deep sigh, begrudging for the thousandth time that that archaic medium had survived while the endless versatility of electronic communication that had all but replaced it had vanished overnight.

  I got the wind-up radio down. The decals of the inane afternoon show for which it must once have been a phone-in prize were decoloured, the goofy leers of the presenters almost faded to white, as if their owners were vanishing from history like Marty McFly’s family, and like the movie they were in too. The red plastic winked in the candlelight like kola kubes. I wound the handle twenty, thirty, forty rotations to get the clockwork running and extended the aerial. The soft static was like the sea. Distant and disheartening. Nevertheless, I bent my ear to the speaker and inched the tuning dial up through the bands. Up and back down. The sound of nothing.

  “Any luck”? Ettrick reappeared holding a couple of books. The cover of the topmost one showed a picture of Michael Aspel standing in front of some stately home.

  “Bloody hell,” I said. “The Antiques Roadshow? How old is that?”

  Ettrick flipped to the front. “Nineteen Eighty Four,” he said. “But it hardly invalidates the contents…”

  “I know.” I held my hands up. “It just brings back memories. So, what about it?”

  Ettrick showed me a glossy picture of a piece of pottery that bore some resemblance to the pot the bubble had left.

  “I found a recipe too,” Ettrick, opening the other, much older, book. The Household Companion. “Look. Cinnamon, eggs. The alcohol they used was sack. Do you know what sack was?”

  I ignored the invitation to ramble along this particular sidetrack of Ettrick’s esoteric knowledge. “My grandmother used to make us hot milk with a drop of whisky in it,” I said, and immediately my mouth remembered the warm comforting milk, the aromatic alcohol making me drowsy as I nestled in front of the fire and the mantle clock ticked and the TV murmured. Wanting to fight the drowse of my eyelids so I could tell the kids at school that I’d stayed up to watch Kojak. “Oh, God, what I’d give right now…”

  “For what?”

  I didn’t know how to answer him. For a taste o
f that milk, for certain. But also for the simplicity of childhood, when there was nothing greater to worry about than peer acceptance. Or if not that, for the time when milk was in the fridge, the twelve year old Caol Ila was in the booze cupboard, and Kojak could be torrented on a whim.

  “Fuck,” I said. “It’s all gone.”

  Ettrick’s face fell, and I knew he suspected a dark wave ready to break over me. “You need a drink,” he said. “We don’t have whisky, but a drop of port perhaps.”

  We had three partial bottles that I’d looted from a Threshers. The glass had been fused to a razor sharp plane across what would have been the necks, so we tried to drill through the bases. A lot of effort and a considerable amount of mess later, I said, “Well, that’s it. We might as well just kill ourselves now.”

  Ettrick froze with anxiety.

  “I was joking.” I sighed. “I’ve got plenty reasons to keep going.” I tried a reassuring smile. “Well, one anyway.” I couldn’t help the way it sounded. He knew I wasn’t referring to him.

  “Karen’s not coming back, Jim,” he said. “No-one ever comes back.”

  “I know.” He still didn’t understand. I wasn’t waiting for Karen to come back.

  “Hardly anything of use or value comes through on this side of the exchange.”

  “I know, Ettrick.” I was waiting for a bubble – the right bubble – and to have the guts to take the chance, but how could I ever tell him that?

  “Which is why—”

  “I know, man. You don’t have to spell it out.”

  “Which is why we have to treat everything that does as a gift.”

  “A gift?” I got up and retrieved the china pot from the table. “How incredibly useful.” I was almost shouting now, but had to get it out. “How fucking generous our universe is, don’t you think? It takes everything we had, and everyone we knew and loved, and what do we get in return? A lovely antique fucking chamber pot.” I’d had no intention to do so but suddenly the pot was raised above my head and all I could think of was the satisfying crash it would make. Then Ettrick was holding my arms and for a moment it was as if I was the old man, him the younger. I lost the strength to hold the thing, my legs folded beneath me, but Ettrick was strong, kept both of us up. He eased the pot from my hands and lowered me into a chair.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  He hovered, uncertain. “Jim…”

  I got up so fast that the chair unbalanced. He caught that too.

  “Fuck off, Ettrick.”

  I went to bed.

  * * *

  I never lost the fear of waking up to discover that a bubble had manifested around my bed and transported some portion of me to Elsewhere.

  After Karen went, that fear had become half a hope.

  There was no bubble in the night. Grey dawn shimmered the bookshelves in Ettrick’s spare room with an otherworldly sheen, but there was no mistaking this for Elsewhere.

  With a rain jar I drowned the grogginess and the lingering tatters of dark thought. I didn’t bother with breakfast, wanting to be out before Ettrick stirred, but in the hall I found a discarded scrap of paper that stopped me. Ettrick’s handwriting was predictably neat. His shopping list unambiguous.

  Eggs – powdered?

  Milk – UHT/condensed?

  Sack – good sherry, not the cooking stuff.

  The rain became a downpour as I reached the edge of the golden circle. I forced myself to stop and work out which direction Ettrick had taken. He was a smart man, but he was thinking irrationally. Whether he was trying to prove that he was able to pull his weight after all or thought he could make me feel better with a warm drink, he was off his head. Ettrick may even have listened attentively when I related my daily experiences of the bubbles, but apart from a couple of encounters right back at the beginning he didn’t know what it was like out here. He didn’t know the signs, wouldn’t have a clue what to do if he got himself in trouble.

  All the same, if he’d gone to the bother of making a shopping list, wasn’t it possible that he’d also taken a moment to check the map? What would he see? The area I’d not attempted to scavenge yet. The place I’d been leaving until we were completely out of alternatives. The city centre.

  I headed east. Slowly, searching and calling his name. There was no response and I saw no activity, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been any. I skirted between the crater fields and pinnacle forests that had been the Kelvin Hall and the art galleries, but saw no sign. By the time I traversed the length of western Sauchiehall Street I was soaked through and cursing the old bastard’s name even as I yelled it out.

  At Charing Cross, the Victorian tenements of the West End and the city centre had been permanently separated in the 1970s by the deep cut of the motorway. After the bubbles, it became a precipitous trench that I’d hoped might be safely circumvented by a mile or more’s detour to the north in search of a place where the collapsed roadway might be crossed. The same would be true to the south, even if I was brave enough to attempt a river crossing downstream from the shifting, cracking, rubble weir that was what remained of the Kingston Bridge.

  If Ettrick had made it this far, he would have discovered that this was the reason that I’d left the area untouched.

  But there was another way in.

  I wouldn’t have chanced the pedestrian footbridge unless I was absolutely desperate. The concrete arch was almost nibbled completely away, the iron railings all but missing. If it was still just about possible to cross, only a madman would try it. As I mounted the ramp, I saw something that both reassured and chilled me. A beacon-bright red tube of flimsy polyester, caught on a stanchion and flapping in the breeze like a wind sock. It was a sleeve from a red cagoule that I had last seen neatly on a shelf in Ettrick’s hall. I had often sneered internally that a man who never went out should own something so outlandish as a pac-a-mac. Now I forced myself to examine it: the crimped cuff at the narrow end, the melt-blackened plastic at the other. No blood though, either on the sleeve or on the ground. Which meant chances were good that Ettrick hadn’t been wearing the thing when the bubble appeared. I imagined the rain coming on, the hapless old man unpacking the thing, shaking it out and getting in a fankle even as a bubble formed and steeled inches from the back of his head. Jumping, surprised by the pop and the fact he was holding on to this suddenly useless, incongruous piece of material and actually breathing the air of Elsewhere into his own lungs.

  Well, that would shut the fucking know-all up on that subject at least.

  The crossing was worse than I feared. With every step I felt the concrete span move, as if unsure of the earth that anchored it. The moorings were exposed and crumbling into the pit below. The rain swirled around me, my feet stumbling as I navigated the edges of holes and, once, a pile of deposited sod. The Elsewhere grass had been a velvety olive colour and sported tiny star-shaped flowers. Both were long since withered and faded but I couldn’t help kneeling, breathing deep. The aroma of the other place was barely detectable.

  I bellowed into the wind. Cried and cursed until my throat was raw and my fists turned white.

  * * *

  I found Ettrick in a glass-fronted shopping centre. The windows were peppered with circular holes like someone had used it for golf practice. He was in a whisky shop. Standing, soaked, in his cardigan, with a wire basket filled with liquor and peering at a bottle of Oloroso like a connoisseur on a spree.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  It was hard to tell if I’d given him a fright or if the stretching ‘O’ of his lips as he turned to face me was the beginning of a smile or a word of welcome. It was hard to tell because, in the second it took for him to react to my challenge, Ettrick was enveloped by the shimmering skin of a bubble. It grew that fast. One moment, a wink in the air, a point disturbance in front of his chest; then a rush of expanding air and there it was. It cleared his head easily and encompassed the shopping basket with room to spare.

  It was close to being
the perfect bubble.

  The only problem was that its lowest extremity stopped some eight inches from the floor. I walked towards him, palms calming, mouth opening to tell him everything was going to be all right. I did. The words were right there on the tip of my tongue. There was no question that I was going to save him. It was only the question of whether I would be close enough to exchange places that gave me an instant’s pause. I took two more strides, and took the breath needed to give my petrified neighbour the instructions for his safety. In a matter of seconds he would be safe and I’d have at least a chance of being with Karen again.

  That was what was going to happen.

  But universes do not operate according to our preferred order of things. They are not serendipitous; not kind or just or fair.

  The bubble steeled rapidly. Ettrick’s terror as the skin opaqued to a thunderous, oily silver, leaving only trouser cuffs and sorry shoes emerging from its base, was apparent.

  “Jump.”

  I thought he wasn’t going to make it. I’d never seen him do more than shuffle around the flat. Then one foot rose into the bubble, and after a brief wobble, the other followed it. I imagined him, inside, off balance and realising that he wasn’t going to just hang there. Even as his feet started to return to earth, his hands must have flown outwards, the corner of his basket escaping the sphere just at the moment that the structure, and all inside it, vanished to Elsewhere.

  The pop was a thunderclap that shocked the breath from me and caused the already perforated window to come crashing down. A sudden wind. A belt of coldness.

  The sheered corner of the basket spun on the floor. Its edges were melted.

  Nothing else came through. Not even the faintest aroma of the air of Elsewhere. I was sure the bubble had exchanged with near-vacuum. I thought of two planets in two universes passing, exchanging earth and air for a time before moving apart. For ever.

  * * *

  The bubbles are rare now, and those that do appear bring nothing but cold. The idea that I might be jumping into space has dampened my enthusiasm, but it has not killed the urge completely. Perhaps, when circumstances are right again.