by Nina Allan
She takes the laminated map from her rucksack and unfolds it, just to try and gain a sense of where she is. She notices how the city is shaped like a hexagon, or like a snail shell, the streets and waterways like secret passages, tunnelling inward. Selena remembers something Julie said to her about one of the maps Cally had drawn, showing a section of an ancient city that was formed like a labyrinth.
Selena cannot remember the name of the city that Cally drew – the alien, imaginary city – but suddenly it is as if its buildings and piazzas and thoroughfares have been superimposed on to Amsterdam, or secreted within it, something. The result is that Amsterdam no longer feels quite real, or perhaps the alien city feels more real, and Amsterdam feels like a copy or a model, a child’s version, a means of learning about the world, rather than the world itself.
It would be easy, Selena realises, to carry on with this train of thought, to keep picking away at the scab of normality until it flakes off. Like Dad did, and Julie too. Staring the world in the face until quite ordinary objects begin to seem like forgeries of themselves, facsimiles – all surface, with nothing behind.
Selena realises she has barely thought of Julie all day until this moment. The novelty of being in Amsterdam has blanked her out.
Selena has not seen Julie or spoken to her since the Thursday of the week before, when Julie came back from London and they had that terrible row.
* * *
Julie called from the station, asking if she could come round. Selena was just leaving work. She almost said no, because she was tired, but in the end she said yes because it seemed easier to agree than to try and explain. Julie turned up less than five minutes after Selena arrived home. There was something different about her, Selena noticed that at once. She could not say what that difference was exactly, but it put her on edge nonetheless. She ordered takeaway from the Mogul Tandoori on Wilmslow Road and then went out to fetch it, glad to be in the open air again even though she’d only just come in. It was colder out, and spitting rain. Julie had offered to go to the restaurant with her but Selena had said no, it would only take five minutes, no point in both of them getting wet.
When she returned with the food, she found Julie sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Heineken. She looked up as Selena entered, coming to life with a jerk as if Selena’s presence had triggered some kind of activation mechanism.
“Are you OK?” Selena asked. “How did you get on in London?”
Julie had been away for three days. She hadn’t said where she was staying, and continued to be evasive when Selena asked her about it.
“With a friend,” she said, then changed the subject. She seemed distracted, although when Selena dished up the curry she managed to clear her plate in under five minutes. “I haven’t eaten all day,” she said. She pushed her plate away from her towards the centre of the table and leaned back in her seat. “I saw Nadine,” she said. “Do you want to know what she said?”
“Of course,” Selena said. I thought you’d never ask, she thought. She felt anxious in spite of herself. She hoped Julie’s visit to the – what was it? – xenometallurgist wouldn’t turn out to have been a bad idea.
Too late now, she thought. Trust you, Vanja.
Julie didn’t answer at first. She took a swig of her beer instead, drinking straight from the bottle in a way that for a second reminded Selena of Johnny.
“There are tests she has to do,” Julie said at last. “But she says she’s certain. As certain as she can be, anyway.”
“Certain of what?” Selena said. She could feel her heart pounding, the insistent, uncomfortable pressure of the blood pulsing in her veins from the inside out. She scraped the remains of her curry noisily together with the edge of her fork.
“Nadine believes the pendant is of extraterrestrial origin,” Julie said. “Or that the metals and minerals it’s made of are, which is the same thing really, isn’t it?”
Selena listened to her words, the sheer outlandishness of them, words that if you heard them anywhere but on The X-Files – on a TV chat show, say, or out of the mouth of a drunken pensioner shambling down the steps of their local off licence, or across the counter at Leggett’s – you would dismiss on the spot as terminal confusion, as lunacy, as eccentricity maybe, but only if you were trying to be kind.
Selena sighed. For the first time almost, she feared she was running out of patience. She had been listening to this stuff for months now and she was sick of tiptoeing around Julie’s feelings, treating her like an invalid, incapable of dealing with the truth unless it was broken down for her into bite-sized portions. I won’t break, she remembered Julie saying. Well then, let’s see. The idea of speaking her mind was like a drug, she found, a tablet of amphetamine, dissolving into her bloodstream, foaming inside her insides like a glass of champagne.
“Oh for God’s sake, Julie,” she said. The words were out before she could stop them. “Fuck this. I’ve had enough.” Fuck you, she almost added, then managed not to, then wished she had. She could feel her self-control sliding away from her like a trap door opening. She realised she was smiling, the grin plastered across her face like someone painted it there, the garish, clownish colours, the paler highlights denoting moisture, the pigment still wet.
Julie was hunched up against the table, cowering like a wounded animal. Surprise, surprise. Precious Julie, so fragile you daren’t speak a word. How convenient.
“You don’t mean that,” Julie said. “Not after everything we’ve talked about.” Her voice trembled, though her eyes looked frozen somehow, panicked, the eyes of someone who’d been running for hours and was all out of breath.
She’s exhausted, Selena realised. Dead beat, and an image came to her then of her father: Ray after one of his marathon cross-country drives, eighteen hours at the wheel and then four hours of sleep snatched in a lay-by before struggling home from whichever random place he’d ended up in, Sheffield or Edinburgh or Slough or Virginia Water.
Unshaven and stinking of sweat, his brain in a state so different from what passed as normality he found himself losing the ability to travel between the two.
But what about the rest of us, Julie? You can call us cowards and normals and yes-men as much as you want, but that won’t change a thing. People like me and Mum, we’re stuck with the authorised version of life whether we like it or not, the boilerplate contract. You feel contempt for us and that’s OK, that’s your right, but we soldier on at least. Have you ever wondered what would happen to you if we didn’t?
Selena felt her anger loping away like a stray dog, like an urban fox caught by the sunrise. Its red breath lingered maddeningly, a souvenir of transgression.
“Julie,” she said. Her mouth felt parched. “I know something happened to you, something terrible. I want to help you, but we’ve got to stop pretending.”
“You think I’ve been pretending?” Julie said. Her face was pale, greyish. She seemed close to tears.
“What else do you expect me to think? Honestly?”
Julie scraped her chair back from the table and stood up. At least she’s had something to eat, Selena found herself thinking. She must have been starving. “Don’t go like this,” she said. “Can’t we at least talk about this like adults?”
Julie pulled on her coat and made for the door without saying a word. Selena heard a thump as the door slammed behind her and then she was gone.
* * *
The canals of Amsterdam are sparkling like dream roads. Selena thinks of those provincial English cities that become dead zones at night, their precincts and underpasses sinister suddenly, like sets from disaster movies, their pavements and car parks flyblown and rain-streaked. Industries laid to waste and workers demonised, history demolished. Racketeering and rent rises, unemployment and bomb damage, decade after decade after decade of governmental neglect. People cling on in such places, Selena thinks, but they don’t flourish.
Amsterdam feels different to her, although she understands that this could be beca
use she is a stranger here, and can only understand the city in a rough translation. Its internal rhythms and secret histories, its old enmities and inherent vices – these aspects of the city remain hidden from her, rendered invisible by the magnificent houses flanking the waterways, the picturesque barges cloaked in greenery, the ancient cobblestones. Those parts of history that insist that history is all in the past.
All cities are like Manchester under the skin, Selena thinks. Even the gorgeous ones, the favoured ones, the cities that ride like queens upon the tides of fortune. Opportunists, because they have to be. Change or die.
Xenometallurgy is really a thing, Selena has discovered, a discipline you can study at university. Meteorites, moon rock, other artefacts of unknown origin all contain trace metals – metals the xenometallurgist will offer assistance in identifying. It is a young science, and prone to being misunderstood, although in essence it is no different from any other branch of metallurgy as taught and researched and practised in every major scientific institution throughout the world.
The idea that Nadine Akoujan is part of a recognised scientific discipline is reassuring to Selena. No doubt Julie would mock her need for such reassurances as intellectual cowardice. You’re such a square, Selena. She wishes now that she’d asked Julie some sensible questions about Nadine instead of just losing it. She had considered telephoning Julie, to apologise, then decided to leave it until after she returns from Amsterdam. They could both use the break, she reasoned. Then once she was actually on the plane, she wished she’d phoned anyway. She cannot even remember if she has told Julie she is going away. She texted Julie from the hotel just in case, soon after they arrived, but there has been no reply.
Two cyclists ride past on fluorescent bicycles, wearing identical silver eye make-up and pink feather boas. They look like twin brothers, twin angels, and part of the joy Selena feels in glimpsing them arises from the fact that here in the silvered darkness of Amsterdam, nobody is paying these men the slightest attention. It occurs to her that Julie’s story about an alien encounter is just one story among many and not that unusual. In Amsterdam alone there would be dozens of them, thousands. Amsterdam could be twinned with an alien city for all I know. Something in the smoke.
Selena grins. She wonders how Vanja would react if she were to tell her she’d spent her free evening in one of the coffee shops on the Dwarsstraat, reclining on cushions and smoking a spliff with the rest of the tourists. Oh yeah? she would probably say. Which one did you go to? Not that Selena is seriously considering it, she would feel ridiculous. She has smoked pot precisely once, when she was nineteen. Even Johnny has given it up, more or less – he wouldn’t do anything that might endanger his HGV licence.
There are rules for such things, no doubt, as there are for everything. Coffee shop etiquette. The concept makes Selena want to giggle. She wouldn’t even know what to ask for.
Something to help me see the aliens, she thinks. She walks on, through narrower alleyways, beside lambent canals. A woman in a gold puffer jacket flashes past on roller blades. When Selena’s phone goes and the caller is Julie, she isn’t surprised.
I’m sorry, Selena. I shouldn’t have left like that.
No, I’m sorry for going off at you. Are you all right?
I’m scared, Selena. I keep thinking I’m changing. I can’t think properly. It’s like my mind’s gone cloudy.
Hang on a moment. What do you mean, you can’t think properly?
I keep forgetting words.
Julie, that’s normal, everyone gets like that sometimes. You’re just tired.
But what if it’s more than that? I don’t feel right, Selena. I can’t seem to get warm.
Didn’t you tell me that Elina began to change less than six months after she became infected? You’ve been back here for ages, years. If anything was going to happen it would have happened by now. You’ve probably just got a cold or something.
I never thought of it like that. The time difference, I mean.
Well, you should. It’s my fault, anyway. I knew you were upset. I should have taken more notice.
It’s not your fault, Selena. I’ve been asking too much of you, I know that. I’ve been having nightmares recently. I spooked myself, that’s all.
Nightmares about Elina?
About Steven Jimson.
You should have said.
I hate talking about him. What’s it like there, anyway?
Amsterdam? It’s great. We should come here together sometime.
I’d like that, I really would. Thanks for talking. I feel much better now.
Will you be OK until I get back?
Of course I will. I’m being an idiot. Don’t worry about me.
I do believe you, Julie, she wants to say, but she doesn’t, not quite, because Julie has rung off already and also because even now, just seconds after they terminate their phone call, she still has no idea what she believes, or thinks, or even wants to think. She is glad of her solitude, she realises, glad of Vanja’s minor treachery in abandoning her, and when she arrives back in the hotel lobby, alive with warmth and the laughter of strangers, she is glad of that, too. She climbs the narrow stairway to her room in the eaves, wondering if it might be possible to find a house like this in Manchester, a tall house with gables and a wood stove, a house she could share with Julie that would make her feel safe.
The Dutch house creaks, as if in sympathy. It is almost midnight, Selena sees. Still no sign of Vanja. What a surprise.
* * *
Thanks for last night, Vanja says.
It is eleven o’clock the next morning and they are drinking coffee in one of the cafés along the Prinsengracht. There’s still an hour before they have to leave for the airport. The sun comes out for ten minutes and then goes in again. Vanja looks pretty wrecked, although that might have something to do with the fact that she’s not wearing make-up.
It’s because of Vasili, you see, she says. He knows about Alex, but he doesn’t like me to talk about him because of his father. Alex’s dad was a friend of Vasili’s, years ago, when we were all living in Berlin. It’s complicated. But Alexei is my son and I need to see him. And the grandkids too. Look.
Vanja takes out her phone and scrolls through a series of photographs: herself, seated between two small children, a boy and a girl. In some they’re on a sofa with big, brightly coloured cushions behind. In others they’re at the breakfast table. Selena can see glasses of orange juice, a plate of cheese slices, seeded rolls. The kids look like Alex.
Where did you go, anyway? Selena asks. After you left the restaurant.
Oh, we went to The Bulldog. It’s amazing there in the evenings. You should have come.
If you’d invited me I might have done, Selena thinks but does not say. The Bulldog is one of Amsterdam’s oldest coffee shops – Selena knows this, because she’s seen a reference to it in the guidebook she bought. She supposes it is Vanja’s evening in The Bulldog, rather than her grandchildren, that is responsible for the dark circles beneath her eyes.
Did you have a good evening? Vanja asks.
Great, Selena says. Just walking around. It’s a beautiful city.
You were OK, by yourself?
Selena nods. She remembers the two lovers? brothers? in their feather boas on their fluorescent bicycles. Pink ghosts in the night. It’s a special place.
It occurs to her once more that she could decide to stay here, disappear into the crowd, become someone else. Like Julie tried to, you mean? she thinks. By scoring a line through one life and beginning another?
If it didn’t work for Julie then how could she even think that it could work for her?
When the time comes to go to the airport she feels almost relieved. The plane boards on time. Vanja falls asleep almost as soon as they’re in their seats. She snores lightly, her head resting against the window, her hair askew on her cheek like strands of seaweed.
The sky remains clear until they begin their descent into Manchester. The rainclo
uds whip by the windows, bulky as puddings.
7
“I think we should go back,” Selena said. “I don’t know why you wanted to come out here in the first place.”
“I’ve never experienced the English countryside,” said Vanja. “I wanted to see what it was like.” She lifted her head and sniffed the air. Making a joke of it, Selena thought, trying to make out she’d never ventured this far out of Manchester before, which perhaps she hadn’t. She was wearing a ratty green parka, a garment Selena would not have imagined her owning in a million years, though in a weird way it suited her and for a moment Selena found herself imagining her as someone else: Vanja after the apocalypse, camping out in the hills, heating soup over an open fire and collecting rainwater in a plastic bucket.
Where had Vanja come from, exactly? What had her life been like, before she wound up in Manchester? Selena felt ashamed to admit she had no idea. She must think I’m pathetic, the way I hide from life, she thought. The way I back off from anything the moment it becomes remotely interesting.
It was raining, but only slightly. The surface of Hatchmere Lake was cloudy, burred all over with a fine mist, like a mirror coated in condensation. Selena hadn’t been out here for years, not since Dad, not since forever. There were signs now, warning you about the dangers of unsupervised swimming, and the footpath that skirted the lake had been blocked off. Fishing was strictly prohibited. So much for those sneaky perverts with their mighty rods. She studied the information boards outside the Forestry Commission office, which gave details of how the unique and valuable landscape of peat bog was being restored. A good thing, probably, although there was something melancholy also in the way things were now, in the absence of people. She was surprised by how unfamiliar everything felt. It was almost as if the place as she had known it had been erased.
