Unaided, I climb down from the patio and hobble along the pathways of my stepped garden. Since Bill decided that I wasn’t up to maintaining it any longer and bought me a mec-cultivator, I really only wander out here at night. I’ve always been a raggedy kind of gardener, and this place is now far too neat for me. You could putt on the neat little lawns, and the borders are a lesson in geometry. So I generally make do with darkness, the secret touch of the leaves, the scents of hidden blooms. I haven’t seen the mec-cultivator for several days now anyway, although it’s obviously still keeping busy, trundling along with its silver arms and prettily painted panels, searching endlessly for weeds, collecting seedheads, snipping at stray fingers of ivy. We avoid each other, it and I. In its prim determination—even in the flower displays that it delivers to the house when I’m not looking—it reminds me of Bill. He tries so hard, does Bill. He’s a worrier in an age when people have given up worrying. And he’s a carer, too. I know that. And I love my son. I truly love him. I just wish that Hannah was alive to love him with me. I wish that she was walking the streets of the port, buying dresses from the stalls down by the harbour. I just wish that things were a little different.
I sit down on the wall. It’s hard to remember for sure now whether things were ever that happy for me. I must go back to times late in the last century when I was with Hannah, and everything was so much less easy then. We all thought the world was ending, for a start. Everything we did had a kind of twilit intensity. Of course, I was lucky; I worked in engineering construction—all those Newtonian equations that are now routinely demolished—at a time when rivers were being diverted, flood barriers erected, seas tamed. I had money and I had opportunity. But if you spend your life thinking Lucky, Lucky, Lucky, you’re really simply waiting for a fall. I remember the agonies Hannah and I went through before we decided to have Bill. We talked on and on about the wars, the heat, the continents of skeleton bodies. But we finally decided as parents always do that love and hope is enough. And we made love as thought we meant it, and Bill was born, and the money—at least for us—kept on coming in through the endless recessions. There even inklings of the ways that things would get better. I remember TV programmes where academics tried to describe the golden horizons that lay ahead—how unravelling the edges of possibility and time promised predictive intelligence, unlimited energy. Hannah and I were better equipped than most to understand, but we were still puzzled, confused. And we knew enough about history to recognise the parallels between all this quantum magic the fiasco of nuclear power, which must once have seemed equally promising, and equally incomprehensible.
But this time the physicists had got it largely right. Bill must have been ten by the time the good news began to outweigh the bad, and he was still drawing pictures of burnt-out rainforest, although by then he was using a paintbox PC to do it. I remember that I was a little amazed at his steady aura of gloom. But I thought that perhaps he just needed time to change and adjust to a world that was undeniably getting better, and perhaps he would have done, become like Saul and Agatha—a child of the bright new age—if Hannah hadn’t died.
I totter back through the garden, across the patio and into the house. Feeling like a voyeur, I peek into Saul and Agatha’s bedroom. They’ve been here—what?—less than a day, and already it looks deeply lived in; and smells like a gym. Odd socks and bedsheets and tissues are strewn across the floor, along with food wrappers (does that mean I’m not feeding them enough?), shoes, the torn pages of the in-flight shuttle magazine, the softly glowing sheet of whatever book Agatha’s reading. I gaze at it, but of course it’s not a book, but another game; Agatha’s probably never read a book in her life. Whatever the thing is, I feel giddy just looking at it. Like falling down a prismatic well.
Putting the thing down again exactly where I found it, I notice that they’ve broken the top off the vase on the dresser, and then pushed the shards back into place. It’s a thing that Hannah bought from one of those shops that used to sell third world goods at first world prices; when there was a third and first world. Thick blue glaze, decorated with unlikely-looking birds. I used to hate that vase, until Hannah died, and then the things we squabbled over became achingly sweet. Saul and Agatha’ll probably tell me about breaking it when they find the right moment. Or perhaps they think Papa’ll never notice. But I don’t mind. I really don’t care. Saul and Agatha can break anything they want, smash up this whole fucking house. I almost wish they would, in fact, or at least leave some lasting impression. This place is filled with the stuff of a lifetime, but now it seems empty. How I envy my grandchildren this dreadfully messy room, the way they manage to fill up so much space from those little bags and with all the life they bring with them. If only I could programme my hoover not to tidy it all up into oblivion as soon as they go, I’d leave it this way forever.
Saul’s stuffed the metacam back into the top of his travelling bag on the floor. I can see the white corner of the palette sticking out, and part of me wants to take a good look, maybe even turn it on and try to work out if he really meant that stuff about showing alternate realities. But I go cold at the thought of dropping or breaking it—it’s obviously his current favourite toy—and my hands are trembling slightly even as I think of the possibilities, of half worlds beside our own. I see an image: me bending over the metacam as it lies smashed on the tiled floor. Would the metacam record of its own destruction? Does it really matter?
I leave the room, close the door. Then I reopen it to check that I’ve left things as they were. I close the door again, then I pull it back ajar, as I found it.
I go to my room, wash, and then the bedhelper trundles out and lifts me into bed even though I could have managed it on my own. I blink three times to turn off my eardrums. Then I close my eyes.
Sleep on demand isn’t an option that Doc Fanian’s been able to offer me yet. When I’ve mentioned to him how long the nights can seem—and conversely how easily I drop without willing it in the middle of the afternoon—he gives me a look that suggests that he’s heard the same thing from thousands of other elderly patients on this island. I’m sure a solution to these empty hours will be found eventually, but helping the old has never been a primary aim of technology. We’re flotsam at the edge of the great ocean of life. We have to make do with spin-offs as the waves push us further and further up the beach.
But no sleep. No sleep. Just silence and whiteness. If I wasn’t so tired, I’d pursue the age-old remedy and get up and actually do something. It would be better, at least, to think happy thoughts of this happy day. But Saul and Agatha evade me. Somehow, they’re still too close to be real. Memory needs distance, understanding. That’s what sleep’s for, but as you get older, you want sleep, but you don’t need it. I turn over in shimmering endless whiteness. I find myself thinking of gadgets, of driftwood spindrift spinoffs. Endless broken gadgets on a white infinite shore. Their cracked lids and flailing wires. If only I could kneel, bend, pick them up and come to some kind of understanding. If only these bones would allow.
There was a time when I could work the latest japanese gadget straight out of the box. I was a master. VCR two-year-event timers, graphic equalisers, PCs and photocopiers, the eight-speaker stereo in the car. Even those fancy camcorders were no problem, although somehow the results were always disappointing. I remember Hannah walking down a frosty lane, glancing back towards me with the bare winter trees behind her, smiling though grey clouds of breath. And Hannah in some park with boats on a lake, holding baby Bill up for me as I crouched with my eye pressed to the viewfinder. I used to play those tapes late at the night after she died when Bill was asleep up in his room. I’d run them backwards, forwards, freeze-frame. I’d run them even though she wasn’t quite the Hannah I remembered, even though she always looked stiff and uneasy when a lens was pointed at her. I had them re-recorded when the formats changed. Then the formats changed again. Things were re-digitised. Converted into solid-state. Into superconductor rings. Somewhere along th
e way, I lost touch with the technology.
In the morning, the door to the room where my grandchildren are sleeping is closed. After persuading my front door to open, and for some stubborn reason deciding not to put on my autolegs, I hobble out into the sunlight and start to descend the steps at the side of my house unaided. Hand over rickety hand.
It’s another clear and perfect morning. I can see the snow-gleam of the mainland peaks through a cleft in the island hills, and my neighbours the Euthons are heading out on their habitual morning jog. They wave, and I wave back. What’s left of their greying hair is tucked into headbands as though it might get in the way.
The Euthons sometimes invite me to their house for drinks, and, although he’s shown it to me many times before, Mister Euthon always demonstrates his holographic hi-fi, playing Mozart at volume levels that the great genius himself can probably hear far across the warm seas and the green rolling continents in his unmarked grave. I suspect that the Euthon’s real interest in me lies simply in the fascination that the old have for the truly ancient—like gazing at a signpost: this is the way things will lead. But they’re still sprightly enough, barely past one hundred. One morning last summer, I looked out and saw the Euthons chasing each other naked around their swimming pool. Their sagging arms and breasts and bellies flapped like featherless wings. Mrs Euthon was shrieking like a schoolgirl and Mister Euthon had a glistening pink erection. I wish them luck. They’re living this happy, golden age.
I reach the bottom of the steps and catch my breath. Parked in the shadow of my house, my old Ford is dented, splattered with dust and dew. I only ever take it on the short drive to and from the port nowadays, but the roads grow worse by the season, and extract an increasingly heavy price. Who’d have thought the road surfaces would be allowed to get this bad, this far into the future? People generally use flyers now, and what land vehicles there are have predictive suspension; they’ll give you a magic carpet ride over any kind of terrain. Me and my old car, were’re too old to be even an anachronism.
I lift up the hood and gaze inside, breathing the smell of oil and dirt. Ah, good old-fashioned engineering. V8 cylinders. Sparkplugs leading to distributor caps. Rust holes in the wheel arch. I learnt about cars on chilly northern mornings, bit by bit as things refused to work. I can still remember most of it more easily than what I had for lunch yesterday.
A flock of white doves clatter up and circle east, out over the silken sea towards the lime groves on the headland. Bowed down beneath the hood, my fingers trace oiled dirt, and I find myself wishing that the old girl actually needed fixing. But over the years, as bits and pieces have given out and fallen away, the people at the workshop in the port have connected in new devices. I’m still not sure that I believe them when they tell me that until they are introduced into the car’s system, every device is actually the same. To me, that sounds like the kind of baloney you give to someone who’s too stupid to understand. But the new bits soon get oiled-over nicely enough anyway, and after a while they even start to look like the old bits they’ve replaced. It’s like my own body, all the new odds and ends that Doc Fanian’s put in. Eardrums, corneas, a liver, hips, a heart, joints too numerous to mention. Endless chemical implants to make up for all things I should be manufacturing naturally. Little nano-creatures that clean and repair the walls of my arteries. Stuff to keep back the pain. After a while, you start to wonder just how much of something you have to replace before it to ceases to be what it was.
“Fixing something Papa?”
I look up with a start, nearly cracking my head on the underside of the hood.
Agatha.
“I mean, your hands look filthy.” She stares at them, these gnarled old tree roots that Doc Fanian had yet to replace. A little amazed. She’s in the same blouse she wore yesterday. Her hair’s done up with a ribbon.
“Just fiddling around.”
“You must give me and Saul a ride.”
“I’d love to.”
“Did you hear us come back last night, Papa? I’m sorry if we were noisy—and it was pretty late.” Carved out of the gorgeous sunlight, she raises a fist and rubs at sleep-crusted eyes.
“No.” I point. “These ears.”
“So you probably missed the carnival fireworks as well. But it must be great, being able to turn yourself off and on like that. What are they? Re or inter-active?”
I shrug. What can I say...? I can’t even hear fireworks—or my own grandchildren coming in drunk. “Did you have a good time last night?”
“It was nice.” She gazes at me, smiling. Nice. She means it. She means everything she says.
I see that she’s got wine stains on her blouse, and bits of tomato seed. As she leans over the engine, I gaze at the crown of her head, the pale skin whorled beneath.
“You still miss Grandma, don’t you Papa?” she asks, looking up at me from the engine with oil on the tip of her nose.
“It’s all in the past,” I say, fiddling for the catch, pulling the hood back down with a rusty bang.
Agatha gives me a hand as I climb the steps to the front of the house. I lean heavily on her, wondering how I’ll ever manage alone.
I drive Saul and Agatha down to the beach. They rattle around in the back of my Ford, whooping and laughing. And I’m grinning broadly too, happy as a kitten as I take the hairpins in and out of sunlight, though cool shadows of forest with the glittering race of water far below. At last! A chance to show that Papa’s not past it! In control. The gearshift’s automatic, but there’s still the steering, the brakes, the choke, the accelerator. My hands and feet shift in a complex dance, ancient and arcane as alchemy.
We crash down the road in clouds of dust. I bip the horn, but people can hear us coming a mile off, anyway. They point and wave. Flyers dip low, their bee-wings blurring, for a better look. The sun shines bright and hot. The trees are dancing green. The sea is shimmering silver. I’m a mad old man, wise as the deep and lovely hills, deeply loved by his deeply lovely grandchildren. And I decide right here and now that I should get out more often. Meet new strangers. See the island, make the most of the future. Live a little while I still can.
“You’re okay, Papa?”
On the beach, Agatha presses a button, and a striped parasol unfolds. “If we leave this here, it should keep track of the sun for you.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you still swim?” She reaches to her waist and pulls off her tee-shirt. I do not even glance at her breasts.
Saul’s already naked. He stretches out on the white sand beside me. His penis flops out over his thigh; a beached baby whale.
“Do you, Papa? I mean, swim?”
“No,” I say. “Not for a few years.”
“We could try one of the pedalos later.” Agatha steps out from her shorts and knickers. “They’re powered. You don’t have to pedal unless you want to.”
“Sure.”
Agatha shakes the ribbon from her hair and scampers off down the beach, kicking up sand. It’s late morning. Surfers are riding the deep green waves. People are laughing, splashing, swimming, drifting on the tide in huge transparent bubbles. And on the beach there are sun-worshippers and runners, kids making sandcastles, robot vendors selling ice cream.
“Ag and Dad are a real problem,” Saul says, lying back, his eyes closed against the sun.
I glance down at him. “You’re going to see him..?”
He pulls a face. “It’s a duty to see Mum and Dad, you know? It’s not like coming here to see you, Papa.”
“No.”
“You know what they’re like.”
“Yes,” I say, wondering why I even bother with the lie.
Of course, when Hannah died, everyone seemed to assume a deepening closeness would develop between father and son. Everyone, that is, apart from anyone knew anything about grief or bereavement. Bill was eleven then, and when I looked up from the breakfast table one morning, he was twelve, then thirteen. He was finding his own views, starting to
seek independence. He kept himself busy, he did well at school. We went on daytrips together and took foreign holidays. We talked amicably, we visited Mum’s grave at Christmas and on her birthday and walked through the damp grass back to the car keeping our separate silences. Sometimes, we’d talk animatedly about things that didn’t matter. But we never rowed. When he was seventeen, Bill went to college in another town. When he was twenty, he took a job in another country. He wrote and rang dutifully, but the gaps got bigger. Even with tri-dee and the revolutions of instantaneous communication, it got harder and harder to know what to say. And Bill married Meg, and Meg was like him, only more so: a child of that generation. Respectful, hard-working, discreet, always ready to say the right thing. I think they both dealt in currency and commodities for people who couldn’t be bothered to handle their own affairs. I was never quite sure. And Meg was always just a face and a name. Of course, their two kids—when they finally got around to having them—were wildly different. I loved them deeply, richly. I loved them without doubt or question. For a while, when Saul and Agatha were still children and I didn’t yet need these autolegs to get around, I used to visit Bill and Meg regularly.
Agatha runs back up the beach from her swim. She lies down and lets the sun dry her shining body. Then it’s time for the picnic, and to my relief, they both put some clothes back on. I don’t recognise most of the food they spread out on the matting. New flavours, new textures. I certainly didn’t buy any of it yesterday on my trip to the port. But anyway, it’s delicious, as lovely as this day.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 30
