by Nina Allan
“Is Tristane the name of a continent?” I said to Cally.
“Continent? Continent is a word for placidity, plain sailing. Tristane is the name of our planet, of course.” She seemed to hesitate, then reached out to take my hands in both of hers.
“It is all right, Julie. Don’t try to force it. Everything will come back to you.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I know you don’t, but don’t worry. You’ve been through a lot. These things take time. The only thing that matters is that you are safe.”
I nodded. The feeling of vertigo, of hideous displacement, had returned. None of this should be happening, and yet it was. I was alive, though. I was still breathing, I could still think.
* * *
Nuna, Rodinia, Panottia, Pangaea. The last four supercontinents. Those first weeks in Fiby were terrible, really, in spite of Noah’s forbearance and Cally’s kindness. Once the truth of what had happened to me began to seep through, a rift seemed to open in my mind, a rift between the universe I appeared to be living in and the one I understood. I found that running through the names of Earth’s ancient supercontinents, repeating them like a mantra, like the lines of a poem, would sometimes help me to fall asleep at night. Laurasia, Gondwana, Laurentia, Siberia, Baltica: names that were code for a past as deeply lost as I now was myself. Curled in the red woollen blanket, I would try to recall every detail I could about those geography lessons – not just the names of the supercontinents, fracturing and dividing like cosmic amoebas through the passage of aeons, but the names of my classmates too: Phoebe Evans and Nuria Ahmed, Sonny Soames and Joel McPherson, Tiger MacFadyen and Honey Pugh – Honey Pugh with her tiny round glasses and diamond nose stud, her arm curved possessively around her exercise book, the entire left-hand page covered not with the names of the supercontinents and their geological lifespans but with an intricate cartoon: our teacher Clarence Denbeigh to the absolute life, his shock of silver hair drawn to look like a lion’s mane, ‘Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion’ printed in exquisite Gothic capitals on a placard around his neck.
Honey Pugh, and her onyx propelling pencil. Clarence Denbeigh, who had a false leg and no left hand because of thalidomide. His voice though was a marvel: soft yet at the same time booming, the voice of an actor on the stage at Stratford-upon-Avon. Each time he opened his mouth to tell you about grain yields in the Ukrainian bread basket you found yourself imagining him reciting Hamlet or Macbeth.
Sunlight streaking across the linoleum floor and bouncing off the gold trim of Honey Pugh’s propelling pencil. The wavery line of white dust beneath the blackboard. The traffic cone on top of the stationery cupboard, confiscated from one of the Brier brothers two terms earlier and now a part of the furniture.
Clarence Denbeigh, drawing Pangaea on the blackboard with a stick of white chalk. Etching in the fault lines, showing us how and where the rifts will develop.
In the classroom, it is always summer. If I think about it hard enough, I can be there again, my head swimming with sunlight and boredom, resentment and the desire to escape.
Nuna.
Laurasia.
Panottia.
Pangaea.
Marvellous, like the names of Greek goddesses. Fierce clods of cake-coloured earth in a steel-grey sea.
* * *
For a while, I was frightened to go outside unless Cally was with me. I was afraid people would see me and realise, that they would point and yell in unearthly voices, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, unmasking me as an alien, running through the streets in droves as they hunted me down.
When I eventually explained these fears to Cally, she just laughed.
Gradually I became used to the homestead, and the stable yard, the lots and packed-dirt roads immediately surrounding it. I spent most of the time in the casa, reading books, the histories especially, and Cally’s atlas, her holographic Gazetteer of the City of Fiby, which came in its own carrying case, marbled julippa with silver clasps, the moving images updated every day from some central database. I learned by heart the names of the districts: Gren-Noor, Gren-Seet, Sisqueena, Murleet, Tarq, Justina, All-Noor, Preet, Callanoor, Suut-Lina, Jon-Tarq, Semmeq. Also the larger fishing ports of Summa, Noorq, Purl and Marilly, the disorganised sprawl of satellite towns along the eastern seaboard, settlements that had sprung up as trading outposts or way stations between one larger settlement and another and had later become permanent, micro-economies founded on scrimshaw or pearl fishing or wrack harvesting and housing those too poor or too rich or too disaffected to pay residency taxes or employment licence to the city proper.
These were the places that haunted my dreams. I told myself that if anything went wrong with Cally and Noah – if they grew tired of me or threw me out, or if they too turned out somehow not to exist – then I could find my way to one of these frontier communities and at least survive, waiting tables in one of the bars, or sweeping the floors in a factory or studio. I could get by. I soon learned that in the port towns you didn’t need identity papers, that all you had to do was say you were Noors and your word would be accepted.
The Noors were said to live beyond the mountains. Occasionally small clans or even lone individuals crossed into Fiby and remained there. They tended to keep themselves to themselves, took unassuming jobs, spoke little and asked few questions.
Cally had a book about a Noors poet named Olla Wurock. Wurock had lived in the port town of Serp for twenty years, working in the canteen of one of the open-cast silver mines. She wrote poems and stories about her journey to Fiby and about her life in the port, mixed in with Noors myths and legends, anecdotes about her family and the close friend she’d been forced to leave behind. Eventually, Olla Wurock became famous, and even consented to interviews occasionally, though she never gave up her job at the canteen.
Her poems started out very simple, but became increasingly complicated and obscure, filled with strange imagery and threaded through with Noors words and phrases that I had to look up in the glossary at the back of the book.
I recognised something in them, though. Something of my own desire to escape from one life and into another, the horrible aching need to make something happen.
4
I was so furious at Mum for her affair. What got to me most was who she’d had it with, that odious Bill guy, that sales rep. I know if I asked her straight out she’d probably tell me she didn’t choose Bill, it was just that Bill happened to be available and she knew he fancied her. Seducing Bill was easy and – because she didn’t actually give a stuff about him – having a fling with Bill didn’t pose any risk. Not much of a risk, anyway. She knew Dad wasn’t vindictive.
Having an affair with someone she cared about would have opened up the possibility of being hurt – a possibility she would have found unacceptable.
You don’t know this, Selena, but once when Mum was at work and not long after the whole Bill thing came out in the open, I went through that cupboard in her office, the one where she kept all those photos and diaries from before we were born, from before Dad, even. I told myself I was just checking to make sure she wasn’t seeing Bill still, but that wasn’t it, or not the whole of it, anyway. The truth was I wanted to find out who the hell Mum really was.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a proper conversation with Mum, not once. She was so competent a mother in all the practical ways, and I suppose that’s what you mainly notice when you’re small: that your school uniform is washed and folded and your favourite flavour of crisps is in your lunchbox.
When you’re a kid you live so much in your own world you barely think of adults as having lives, even. When I realised that Mum lived mostly behind a screen – a screen of efficiency and reasonableness designed to hide every trace of her real personality – it was like playing the alien game all over again.
Who was the alien, though? Her, or me?
Mum had stuff in that cupboard not just from before she was married but from whe
n she was still at school. Copies of her school magazine, a souvenir mug from Blackpool Tower, an empty perfume bottle (Worth’s Je Reviens), a collection of old postcards, all of castles. Some of the postcards had writing on: sloping copperplate script, remarks about the weather in Scotland or the difficulties of obtaining Marmite in Munich. One of the school magazines featured an essay by Mum, in which she talked about searching for old postcards in junk shops in Scarborough and York.
It is as if I travel back in time, just for a moment, she wrote. Holding the postcard in my hand, I can share a fraction of a life that isn’t mine.
The essay – ‘Paper Treasures’ by Margery Hillson – revealed to me a girl whose imagination was the biggest part of her.
What happened?
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one she kept a regular diary. I read some of it, then stopped. Her words, her ideas, the things she wrote about reminded me so much of myself I felt terrified suddenly, scared I would turn into her, with her reasonable husband, her reasonable job at the local medical centre, her two mostly reasonable kids with their blasted lunch boxes (wholemeal bread, not white, and always a Granny Smith apple and a Penguin biscuit).
If those things had happened to Margery Hillson they could happen to me.
I searched for evidence of Bill, not because I cared but because it felt more legitimate. Mum had shagged Bill, after all – didn’t I have a right to know if that was still going on? There was nothing – nothing I could find, anyway – and I can’t say I was surprised. Mum ended up more bored with Bill than she was with Dad. What I did find was a whole stack of letters from someone named Tony. Like the diaries, they were embarrassing to read. Not because they were full of sex or filthy language or anything like that, but because they seemed so full of love. Not the obsessive lust any randy teenager might feel for their first sexual partner, but love for Mum, for Margery Hillson, for the girl who collected antique postcards and kept a diary and hoarded old perfume bottles.
Tony wrote from Macclesfield where he lived and went to college, and then from a town called Champaign, Illinois, where he was doing some kind of advanced summer course in computer science. He talked a lot about how much space there was in America. It makes me feel I could achieve anything, he wrote.
Reading Tony’s letters gave me the oddest feeling. It was like watching a film, the kind you know is going to end badly but you keep watching anyway, because you can’t not. You’re drunk on sadness and in any case, the sadness is OK because it’s not happening to you.
And it turned out to be exactly like that because the letters just stopped. The final one was dated just over a year before Mum and Dad got married.
There were no clues in the letter about what might have happened. I wondered if maybe he’d died, this Tony, had a car crash or something. Or perhaps he’d met someone else, out there in Champaign, Illinois: a fighter pilot or a coffee waitress or a cowhand, someone. I was desperate to know, desperate in the way you get with soap operas, when there’s a good storyline brewing.
I could hardly ask Mum though, could I?
I couldn’t confide in you, either. You were only fourteen.
* * *
I didn’t know what I wanted, and that was the problem. I didn’t have a clue.
You remember Perdita and Rhiannon James? Catey used to call them the piano twins. They were allowed to leave school early on Wednesdays because of their special lesson at Chetham’s and they always, always came joint first in the summer essay competition and usually the maths marathon as well. Lucy was kind of friends with Perdita. She told me once – Lucy, I mean – that the twins had to sit down and do their homework literally the moment they finished supper, and that if either of them scored less than eighty percent in an exam they were both grounded for a week. Not that it made much difference – they were more or less grounded anyway because of all the extra homework and piano lessons.
I thought it sounded like being in prison. I remember saying to Catey that I would have run away from home if it had been me. What I didn’t tell Catey was that at the same time I envied them. I envied them their godawful pushy parents and their book allowance and their residential summer schools. I don’t mean because of the money that was being spent on them. I envied the feeling you always had when you were around them, that Rhiannon and Perdita would grow up to be something, that they had life sorted.
It was the same with Lucy, too. Lucy didn’t have piano lessons but she knew from the age of ten that she wanted to be a doctor, like her mother. How she knew was a mystery, but she did. She felt the doctor-force within her, I suppose.
I think of Olla Wurock, scrubbing down the tables in the works canteen, then going home to her poky apartment above the net lofts and writing a poem about ice on puddles or a flower seller in the market in Serp.
You wouldn’t mind scrubbing tables, would you, if you knew that later on that evening you were going to write a poem?
* * *
When I first came to Fiby I used to think about those letters of Mum’s all the time. I kept wondering what had happened to Tony, how different Mum’s life might have been if they hadn’t split up. I wanted desperately to talk to her about it, even though I knew full well that it would never be possible. Talking to Mum about Tony would mean admitting I’d broken into her cupboard, that I’d searched through her things. That wasn’t the only reason, though.
I’ve forgotten that Bill guy’s surname, isn’t that weird?
* * *
The south side of Fiby is defined by her proximity to the ocean. On clear days you can smell it: a sharp and tangy aroma that is vaguely reminiscent of ginseng. When the weather is overcast, which is most of the time, the atmosphere clings, dampening your hair, leaving salty deposits on your skin and clothes. Whereas the other five great city-states of Tristane have expanded outwards in concentric circles, Fiby has grown sideways and backwards, flowing away from the ocean and into the belts. The northernmost districts, a hundred miles or more from the waterside hotels of Gren-Seq, from the wharves and warehouses, the walkways and piers and cafés of the Seide Arrondy, are so different from them in character it is almost as if they are part of another city.
The cobbled lanes and grand piazzas of the Seide Arrondy eventually extinguish themselves in the factory yards and chimneys and looming sandstone edifices of the Tarq district. Cally’s studio is in one of the refurbished whale-meat processing plants close to the central arm of the main tramlink. The whole of the ground floor area has been given over to the City Library of Maritime History. Cally originally found the studio through a friend, Alix, who worked as a copier in the library’s archive.
Cally is an urban cartographer. She makes maps of derelict buildings and districts within the city’s enclave and especially under it. The city-states are so vast, it is easier if you imagine them as small countries: thousands of acres of buildings and parkland, biodomes and industrial complexes and sub-dorms and cultivation arcs, tram and sub-tram networks and civil protectorates that take days to cross. If cities on Earth are like giant anthills, the city-states of Tristane are termite mounds of unimaginable proportions.
Change sweeps through them in waves, favouring one area with sudden, inexplicable popularity while sweeping another into financial chaos, planning stalemate, political upheaval, social disfavour or cultural disdain. As new neighbourhoods spring up, older districts may be abandoned entirely, only to be reclaimed a decade later as the height of bohemian chic, or simply as somewhere you can rent an apartment for less than half of what you’d pay in an adjoining quartier.
The abandoned places can be dangerous, but they are also fascinating. Dereliction brings an aura of mystery along with the misery, Cally says. She once suggested she made her living from chasing ghosts.
Freak weather events are not uncommon in Fiby. A century ago, an underground river overflowed its channel, flooding a large part of the eastern subterranean district of Pershore. Thousands died. Cally was commissioned to map the Noor-s
et bazaar and its adjoining courthouse, both completely submerged. It was a lucrative contract, Cally said, because it was dangerous, mainly – no one knew exactly what was down there. She trained with a pearl diver from Marilly, who taught her how to use the breathing equipment, but she still found the job onerous.
“I felt panicky the whole time, even with an air cylinder,” she said. “It’s so dark.” She shuddered. She told me that most of the bodies were still down there, because the praesidium had decided it was too expensive to recover them. An Atlantis of hollow-eyed skeletons, still trapped in their homes.
Cally’s job involves miles of walking, every day. Most cartographers use distance-scanning equipment these days, she says, but she prefers to go on foot, taking photographs and collating measurements, listing street signs and advertising hoardings and the ancient place markers put down in the early centuries of the city’s foundation. Later, in her studio, she uses urban planning software to transform the data she has collated into accurate maps. These maps can then be licensed to publishing companies, to the praesidium’s central intelligence archive, to the city constabulary, to commercial investors, whoever is interested.
Cally likes to call herself a scavenger, a waste merchant, collecting together the parts of the city that have been forgotten. She said she knew where to look for me that last time because she’d been telling me about a contract she’d landed, to collect data on Urfe Station, which is only accessible on foot now and miles from anywhere. She reminded me I’d always been fascinated by the old radio transmission headquarters, by what had gone on there, why the decision had been taken to shut it down.
“You were obsessed with that place,” Cally said. “I mean, completely.” She frowned. “You should never have tried to get there on your own, though. You know no one goes near the lake, not in winter. You could have frozen to death out there.”
* * *
[From Our Planet, Our History, Our Home: Elementary Studies in the geography, mythology and culture of Tristane and her Golden Satellites]
