A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  ‘So who’s got a copy of this map?’

  He shakes his head. ‘This one’s ninety year old. Drawn by hand. They didn’t make copies.’

  ‘You mean there’s a way into Sansom’s mines that Sansom don’t know about?’

  ‘And a way out, too,’ says the Broken Twin.

  The battery pack buckles around your waist. The wire clips on behind and the lamp slots into runners on the front of your helmet. James switches his on, testing the power of the borrowed lamp, as the old miner slam-slides the gate shut on the cage. I can no longer see the tea-shop, the gantry or the pile of rucksacks we’ve left behind for safekeeping. It’s just me, James and this red iron elevator.

  ‘Call us when you reach the first phone,’ the old man shouts over the noise of the winder. ‘I’ll pick it up in the shop.’

  A bell rings, and there’s a rattling as the winder lets us down. Daylight scrolls up into the vanishing overworld, dimly replaced by the yellow light from James’ helmet. The cage percusses on its runners. We’re on an ancient hell-train, lowering on a straight track into the earth. I reach up and turn the knob on my lamp to the second stop. The timbered shaft wall flies up in a grey blur. We haven’t been told how far down this thing goes. I start counting the seconds and give up when I get to thirty. James’ eyes are fixed on the chink of daylight that’s slowly fading above the top of the cage door. I touch his arm, in a wasted gesture of reassurance. It’s me who needs reassuring. I keep telling myself that no one else knows we’re down here. I’ll be fine, as long as we can keep it that way.

  The cage slows, halted by complaining frictions. James slides the gate open on a tunnel that just clears his head. Our lamps make the only light, the pale glow and shadow of rough-hewn rock.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s make some cooped-up chimps really happy.’

  ‘James, we’re not here on a rescue mission. We’re going to see what they’re doing down here and then we’re heading straight back the way we came.’

  He sets off along the drive. Underfoot are the wet rails of an ore-cart system, half-buried in solidified dust. The granite shines with sparkles of mica. James’ helmet scrapes the roof. A grey gleam of daylight from a vent far above our heads scuds past like a dream. Crosscuts are pitch black until you angle your light into them, and even then you can only see a few feet into the gloom. Men worked in these holes by candlelight, chasing the body of ore through cracks a half-metre wide. Struts and old ropes lie scattered around, pale with dust. A pile of rubble stands abandoned at the entrance to a crosscut, backfill that never went back in. The roof bows down further and James is crouching, and then even I’m ducking under a huge uncut mass of rock that swells down from the hillside. I can feel the Chinese amulet bouncing around inside my fleece. James is bent double up ahead, his head and upper body swung out awkwardly to one side. The beam of his lamp leaps and warps, shattering into nothingness in crosscuts, breaking into stripes of reflection and shadow.

  Then, unexpectedly, we can stand up. The stope caverns out on either side. A grey plastic telephone hangs in a bracket on a timber. It’s huge and toy-like, as though moulded for giants. James picks up and waits. He shrugs, hearing reasonable advice, okays and hangs up.

  ‘Our friend says to keep going. When we get to the fifth of these phones, he’ll tell us what to do.’

  The second drive is timbered in receding frame-squares like the hold of a ship. My beam splits on the cross-struts and falls away into blackness. I’m in front now, bent double, feet slipping on rust-red tramlines. There’s running water here, forming black rivulets on either side of the rails. A ladderway descends to another level, an unguessable distance below. A passing stope is fenced off with thick wire mesh. Hammers and taps lie abandoned where they were last used. This is the grave of an industry, and we’re robbing it. What I need to know is whether the industry has ghosts. Whether anyone else is breathing this graveyard air.

  At the second phone the old man doesn’t answer. By the time we reach the third, my battery has started to dim. Still the darkness reels us in.

  The drive stops above a ladderway. I can’t see its bottom. Holstered on a timber above us is the fourth grey telephone. James listens, laughs quietly and hangs up.

  ‘Down,’ he says.

  It wasn’t the fear of collapse that was bothering me. It’s when the weight of rock above me concedes to empty space: that’s when I really start getting scared.

  I hang in darkness from the ladder, all my weight suspended above James’ plastic-hatted head. The beam of my dying lamp spatters against limestone a few inches from my face. Black stringy plant-matter hangs down from an unspeakable crevice. Ferric stains like prehistoric cave-paintings slide upwards into shadow. With each rung of descent my coccyx is bashed by rock. I couldn’t fall: I’m jammed in too tight. Every step I take hurts me, but going back without James is not an option. There’s a moment of sheer panic, the rehearsed nightmare of being trapped underground, and then this pressure is eased from my spine and my lamp picks out the walls of a decent-sized stope. I can hear water running through the drive below me. I look up into the hole I’ve just crawled through, and judge about ten metres. We’ve made it. This is the level below.

  James is waiting at the foot of the ladder.

  ‘That’s the fifth phone,’ he says, fixing it with his beam.

  He calls up to the surface while I investigate the drive. There are crosscuts, no more than two feet high, running off either way from where the phone is mounted. They both end in solid plugs of backfill. Further down, the floor of the main level is slurried with red ooze.

  He hangs up, and then reaches up to flick off his lamp. I can’t see his face.

  ‘Turn your light off.’

  He’s whispering.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it.’

  I reach up and toggle the lamp to off. The darkness is total. But the silence is not. There’s a roaring sound, like industrial machinery, muffled by layers of limestone. The pitch is high, like a jet engine. Something that can make fire, endlessly, two hundred metres beneath the earth.

  A flame sparks up in the darkness. James’ face shows up in its coppery light. You can’t read a face by matchlight: you can only trust its sulphurous glows. The flame splits, passing its light to a candle that he’s holding in his other hand. The match flame goes out. He drips wax onto a rock and glues the candle there inside the leftwards crosscut. The roar pulses in and out of phase. James climbs up onto the pile of backfill and seems to be waiting for me.

  ‘In there?’ I ask him.

  Then he’s turning, crawling through the earth.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  At The New Hsi K’an Hotel

  ◉

  Water. We’re swallowed up in the roar. A darkness so total you start to synaesthetise, see things with your hands, feel these immeasurable rock-masses in blobs of colour. Blood shades: yellows and oranges. This cut of granite I’m jammed into squeezes the breath from my ribcage. The roar is a sucking gravity, like the turbine of a jet plane. Then a dim refracted blueness, and a feeling of breaking through a flaw in the earth to a place that has been tropical and sunkissed all along. The din is staggering. James is turned to me and shouting, but his voice doesn’t even shade the whiteness of the noise. I reach the shelf he balances on and look out through a steaming curtain of water. My eyes ache with the brightness of blue sky. On slopes to either side, brilliant flecks of plumage flit through a canopy of rainforest green. Hundreds of feet below, the waterfall crashes into a pool of unreal emerald, raising a mist we feel as high up as here, the palpable breath-fug of a daydream.

  Down to one side of this outcrop of rock, a torrent of holographic fall-water rages through the foyer of a five-star hotel.

  The style is Modern Asian opulent. Everything that could be gold-plated has been; the rest is upholstered in synthetic leather. We’re standing on a ledge above a little seating area off the main foyer, with the artificial waterfall to o
ur backs. The only person down there is a young woman, in slimline virtual lights wired up to a FireBook. She looks Chinese. I can see the glow of some visual presentation spilling out from behind her goggles. Her head is tipped back against the sofa, as though she’d been put to sleep by TV.

  I watch James climb down onto a broad stepped terrace. At the bottom of the steps there’s a picket fence and a gate that opens inwards. Imaginary plesiosaurs splash softly in the pool beside him. I look over into the main foyer, wondering about following him. There’s no one else around.

  The woman smiles dreamily at something her virtual lights are showing her. The screen of her laptop flickers, reflected in the grey casing of her goggles.

  I follow James down into the alcove. The blue-glass shelves of the foyer bar are stocked with alcopops and malt whiskies. I wonder how long it would take to get served. The waterfall goes into a quieter cycle and I can begin to hear shopping music, piped in with the authentically humidified air.

  We sit down on another sofa with our backs to the waterfall. The Chinese woman doesn’t look up. A play of reflections on the outsides of her goggles suggests that some kind of film is showing. From this distance I’m certain that she’s asleep. But then she smiles at something behind her virtual lights and a hand goes up to her neck. Her fingers become busy. She seems to be adjusting something obscured beneath her white top.

  I look around. The footage of the chimps was shot in a rough-hewn cave. There must be more to this place than the glitzy foyer. I wonder if this is one of the researchers. She looks mid-twenties, the right age for a post-doc, but with the slightly hassled look of a young mother. I try to judge her eyes from the frame of them, and imagine them crinkling in teary laughter. But what could the eyes tell me? They’re puppets, like all the other parts on show. Some neural cluster buzzes some other neural cluster, and another deluded meat-machine reads it as joy or despair.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ she tells us.

  We’ve said nothing. The backs of her goggles are opaque grey plastic. I don’t see how she can know we’re here.

  ‘You always were impatient,’ she says. ‘My hot-headed little brother. You never could wait for anything.’

  On the coffee table beside her is a neoprene drinks holder sheathing a plastic sports-drink bottle. She reaches for it and sips at it through its integral straw.

  ‘Do you remember when we were children in Anhui province? We received a parcel that time. You wanted to open it straightaway. But it was a gift for Dong Zhi, and Mother said you had to wait until the winter solstice. See, I’ve gone right back to our childhood in Anhui province! That has to be encouraging.’

  She breaks off to concentrate on something on the screen. Her hands hover above the keyboard then come down on a fluent string of characters. She sighs. One hand goes up to her neck again and reaches inside the white cotton. She smiles, as though hearing satisfying news.

  ‘Does that feel good?’ James says.

  I watch him, wondering what stunt he’s planning now. His black hair is plastered wetly onto his head. Four days of stubble have grown into a patchy beard, through which I can see the doughy swell of a double chin.

  ‘I’m remembering,’ she tells us. ‘That means it’s working.’

  ‘It’s all in there,’ James says. ‘Everything that ever happened to you is tucked away somewhere. We’re just helping you to recover it. You’re amazing. You’re a treasure trove. We want you to reclaim your own story. That’s why we’re here.’

  I wait for him to remember my presence. But something has taken him over, something that hasn’t heard about our love affair. I’m excludable, the girlfriend who doesn’t need to know. Then all at once it’s clear to me: the tone of quiet encouragement, the persistent quest for the truth about the soul. The reassuring voice of David Overstrand, scraping away at the layers.

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ the woman says, looking blindly our way.

  ‘Yes.’

  I worry about this. We should be seeing what we need to see and getting out of here. But David Overstrand’s grip is sure.

  ‘Have you come for my responses?’

  ‘I don’t need them. I can see for myself that it’s working. You’re doing so well.’

  She applies her mouth to the sports drink. There’s a label on the bottle that I can’t read from here. With a lurch of pity I realise that she’s not a researcher on the experiment at all. She’s taking the instructions, not giving them. She’s one of the pale apes Sansom’s scientists are experimenting on.

  ‘They’ve given me this movie to watch. It’s supposed to be all about me. Some people are travelling a long way. They’re speaking to each other in Cantonese. I’m supposed to type my responses in here. But I’ve forgotten what the story is about. That’s my problem. I don’t remember what this has got to do with me.’

  ‘You understood it once. All the knowledge is in you. Somewhere, deep down.’

  ‘James,’ I whisper, ‘I need to talk to you.’

  He turns to me, distracted. To my dismay, he starts briefing me at the same volume as before.

  ‘They’ve fucked up her memory. Don’t ask me how. They’re showing her films from her past and looking to see if she’s going to remember. It’s what we thought they were doing with the chimps. Now we know what they’re really up to.’

  The woman turns her head, sensing for the first time that James is not alone. We need to get out of here before the bar-staff return. I nudge him with my elbow, and he finally seems to acknowledge the urgency.

  ‘Give me your key,’ he says.

  She hesitates, unplugs a smartcard from the port in her FireBook and holds it out to him. Various access privileges are listed on a crystal display. James pockets the card, satisfied.

  ‘Don’t feed the dinosaurs,’ he tells me.

  ‘Don’t give me time.’

  I watch him heading towards a glass door at the back of the alcove, where the smartcard swishes him through. I can see him on a CCTV monitor above the door, foreshortened by the pitch of the camera, just a random hotel guest headed for his minibar. The image switches to another sweep of discreetly numbered doors, another empty maroon-plush corridor.

  The rainforest blinks out. The water is now flowing into a shady rockpool flanked by endless white beach.

  ‘That’s better,’ the woman says. ‘The birds spook me.’

  She puts out a tentative hand, feeling at the dampness of my clothes.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I ask her.

  ‘They are working. We are all working hard.’

  ‘Are there animals here?’

  ‘No. They were taken away. They used to make so much noise.’

  So McQueen wasn’t the only chimp to have escaped from the mines. But this can’t be what Gareth wanted me to see. His plan was to create a system that could talk directly to the Lorenzo Circuit. There must be more.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘We came in a lorry.’

  I reach for her sports drink. There’s some Chinese writing, a picture of a smiling face, and the legend AMYL-7.

  ‘We?’

  ‘All of us. Three families.’

  ‘From the same village?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I look at her. My questions are just noises, strings of characters in a language she no longer understands. It’s the same blind, confused doubt that I see in Effi’s face. Was this girl’s memory destroyed before she came here? I can’t see how else to explain it. A woman in her mid-twenties doesn’t just come down with Alzheimer’s.

  ‘Did you have to pay?’

  She grins. ‘Look around. The five-star treatment. They’ve arranged everything. We can leave here any time we want. As soon as our documents are ready we can look for work.’

  ‘Work? What are you going to do?’

  Her pride is evident. ‘I trained as a communications manager. But there are no jobs for communications managers in Anhui province. So I have to come here.’

&nb
sp; I glance up at the CCTV monitor again, which is still showing the ghosted efficiency of mid-afternoon in a luxury hotel. I remember what James told me about the light railway carrying secret deliveries into Sansom. The lorries discharging their cargoes under cover of darkness. Now I understand the detail that was eluding him. It wasn’t chimps they were shipping in here in the dead of night. It was people.

  ‘Who are you communicating with? Who’s asking you these questions?’

  ‘The doctors, mostly.’

  ‘There are doctors here?’

  ‘Some. And some up above, too.’

  I see her pulling at the cotton around her neck. It’s just nervousness now, a scrabbling for an escape from her forgetfulness. Then the poignancy of her silence seems to hit her, and she starts sobbing quietly.

  I go over to her sofa. I ease the lights from her face and she curls into my arms. On the FireBook’s screen, a lorry is cruising down a motorway. The spotlights in the ceiling of the lounge mist the screen with white reflections. She’s wearing a white top and pale blue hipsters. The skin on her neck is like halva. There’s a fine gold chain around her neck, bearing something of weight. Inside her top I can see the glow of metal. I reach my finger under the chain and pull up a gold amulet. A sick recognition sets my hand shaking, sending the charm flapping against the woman’s exposed clavicle, where the thread of a long scar runs between the top of her ribcage and the fine hairs behind her ear. I lift the girl’s amulet in my fingers and feel the looseness in one of its golden ears, the same sprung rotation that James was so interested in. The exaggerated Chinese eyelids, peering out at the room. I twist the ear in my fingers, charged by the body-warm gold, an energy that’s infecting me. I put my other hand to my own neck and feel the weight of the goddess’ twin hanging there. The woman is saying something to me, but I can’t shift my tongue or force my breath out into a reply. I’m back in the shell of the Saxons’ church, assailed by alien feelings of remembering, my only certainty this little nub of metal in my hand. The Lorenzo Circuit pulls me into its story. And if something tampers with the circuit, the story is changed. A spreading heat begins to creep up along my spine. My stomach muscles start to tighten, sensing a weather my brain has not yet caught up with. Whatever this woman has had done to her, it has also been done to me.