“Look on the brighter side. She could be a new matron…”
The matrons, and a few similar men, lived in the little bungalows clustered down the hill on the island’s south side. They were all beyond a certain age, round and solid, big-hipped; practical and welcoming as farmers about the simple human business of fucking. Easy to like. Easy to confide in. Impossible to fall in love in.
“Or she could be a treat for some once-famous author who’s finally finished something…”
Boult turned to look at Hibbert. “What have you heard?”
“Oh. The usual. Everything and nothing. That our esteemed friend and good citizen watchman Roberts visited your cottage this morning and came back mightily pleased—and a bit agitated.”
Boult’s head was pounding. Perhaps he could do with that drink. Or something to eat. Perhaps—and whatever it really meant—he really did need to get off this island. “I told him that I’d nearly finished my book.”
Hibbert chuckled. “You’ve been telling everyone that for ages.”
“I mean, really finished. Apart from a few checked facts, a couple of odd spellings. I told him he could have it for proofing in a few days.”
“So…” Hibbert took a long slug of his pint, paused, and then slugged again until Clarkie left the bar to deal with a minor spillage around the corner. “Finished as in finished? So why aren’t you buying me this round? Why aren’t we dancing around the tables? The sequel to The Furnace—”
“—It’s not a sequel.”
Hibbert glanced at Clarkie who, dripping rag in hand, was returning.
“Might as well go and stretch our legs, don’t you think, Boult? I hear there’s something called daylight going on outside…”
The two men headed up across the humped back of the island. The hedges were high. It was always just possible that someone was following them on their other side, but the sense of being watched which had been nagging at Boult since he’d seen that trawler in the harbour had faded. Sometimes, you just had to trust your instincts.
“So let’s get this right,” Hibbert was saying. “You haven’t finished your book, but you’ve told Roberts that you have. I won’t bother to ask why.”
“Perhaps I just got sick of the whole business. Perhaps I want to leave this bloody island.”
“No one who says that ever means it. When was the last time you got off here, anyway?”
“Five or six years…” Cavernous hotel rooms filled with a few sticks of old furniture like bones in an empty cathedral. The sounds, the smells, the disgusting food. The taps which groaned and emitted only mud and worms. The pointless lightswitches which he couldn’t help trying to work. And where would we like to go today, citizen writer? Another trip to the mines? Ersatz tea with an ordinary family? Another ride on an ancient, rickety and over-crowded train? Endless delays. Talks to malodorous crowds in unheated halls. And that was as a dignitary.
“The reason, Boult, that you go to the mainland is to remind yourself how fucking, fucking awful it is there. And then you come back here, where things work the sun often shines, at least in midsummer, and the idea of writing imaginary crap for a readership so dull it couldn’t even pick its own nose starts to seem appealing all over again.”
Boult had heard it all before; from Hibbert, and from the voices in his own head. Still, nothing would ever come on the pages he weighted down on his desk with those slate stones but meaningless gibberish.
“You’re not joking? You really haven’t finished it?”
“I’ve barely started. In fact, to be totally honest, I haven’t started at all. The only book I’ve written, the only book I’m ever going to write, is The Furnace. So…” They’d climbed almost all the way to the top of the island. The hedges had fallen away, giving a view of foam-serrated headlands, blue sky. In the north, seemingly so far off across the shining ocean that it hung just beyond the horizon, lay a floating haze which might or might not have been the mainland. “…what happens next?”
Hibbert was breathing hard from the climb. A tug of breeze lifted the long lock of hair he combed over his pate. For a long moment, it hung there, upright like the crest of a parrot, before it slipped down over his ears. “You know it’s not just back to the mainland if they’re disappointed in you, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. It’s not as if I haven’t mentioned to you that I’ve been stuck before…”
“I thought that was all the same bollocks we all come up with. Even Kilbracken. One minute he’s never going to be able to write a single word in a million lifetimes, and the next, hey presto, another five hundred pages of diarrhoea to fill the people’s libraries.”
“I’m not Kilbracken.”
“We can all rejoice in that one small fact, can’t we? But you must have something.”
“I have this exercise. I write whatever comes into my head. cat mat maudlin I used to hope that something would eventually come out of it—a meaningful sentence. I’ve got reams of the stuff. I’ve done it for years. Line after line of nothing…”
The two men walked on. Roberts would have already radioed the message; the next book by the renowned author of The Furnace was finally complete. There would be meetings, timesheets, reallocations of production. Boult could remember how it felt, back in his avid youth, when some long-awaited book finally appeared. The long wait as it passed down the Party lists until the precious object, its spine bent and torn, its pages stained and dog-eared but the words still pristine, finally lay in your hands…
“There must be other stuff. After all these years.”
“Believe me, there isn’t.”
“You’ve always seemed so industrious. So fucking committed. You’ve still got a few days. How was it when you wrote The Furnace? Did it come out all at once, or did it take ages?”
“Funnily enough, it seemed to be both.”
“It is a long book. Although it doesn’t seem so when you’re reading it…” Hibbert was wistfully studying the landscape. The man was older than Boult. He’d started a proper non-writerly career as a citizen teacher before he made it to the island, and so had had time to appreciate life’s true drudgery. No wonder books were so popular on the mainland, with barely an hour of radio on now each night, and no films showing at any of the remaining cinemas apart from the odd documentary about health and hygiene and how fine life was in the mining communes.
No wonder Hibbert had wanted to get away. Years and years of reeking children, and regular submissions to the State competitions of his kitchen table scribblings. He’d once told Bolt how he’d almost come to resign himself to a lifetime of chalkdust and stale urine when he’d finally got to the top of the library list to read a then-popular book called The Furnace. Even before he’d finished it, Hibbert had started to write as never before. One, two novels, and then a third, which he’d submitted to the literary committees with the usual mixture of hope and hopelessness. It was rubbish, as even he admitted, but the ripples cast by The Furnace had dwindled by then, and the citizens were anxious to read something similar, and his career as a teacher had ended, and his one as a writer began…
So much history, Boult thought, lies between us. So little of it means anything.
“You could stall Roberts for a while,” Hibbert suggested. “Tell him you’ve realised there are still a few problems with your masterpiece.”
“You know what he’s like when he gets the bit between his teeth. And once he’s told the mainland…”
“You handwrite, don’t you?”
Boult nodded.
“See, I’ve got this new book of mine that’s almost finished. Of course, it’s nothing like The Furnace or whatever you might have written to follow it. I’m past all that. But it’s words on a page. You could copy it out…” They were facing the mid-afternoon sun now, on the far cliff edge of the island. “If you went for it flat out, it would only take a few days.” The sea below them was full of comets and stars, wheeling birds. “People would be disappointed, after The Fu
rnace. But at least you’d still be here…”
Boult shook his head. “I couldn’t possibly—”
“—Don’t worry. They’ll be another book along for me in a few months. There always is.”
“It isn’t that.” Boult couldn’t imagine a more generous gesture than this. But the island was floating. He, Hibbert, everything seemed to be receding. The clifftop leaned. Whatever it was that this life amounted to, he realised that he’d had enough of it. “Thanks—but I’m sorry.”
“I’m not going to say it’s your funeral.” Hibbert chucked. The gulls bickered and circled. “But there you are. I have…”
Boult the ex-writer stood alone on his favourite beach. The twilight was grainy. The land exhaled heat. He’d done, written, nothing. But for his chance remark to Roberts about that finished book, this could almost have been the end of another typical day.
Even as he watched, a luminous curtain was forming above the mainland. Instead of dropping from the stars, it seemed to push out like a misty exhalation from some deeper dark beyond. The Northern Lights. Twisting and dancing. The tide had drawn back, and the rippled wet sand spreading before him was laid with grey shapes of rocks which seemed to twist and move. The reminded him of lovers, and the sea air gave off that same briny, erotic scent. And where did you go anyway, when you left this island forever? Where did they take you? Surely not simply back to the mainland—and mere death seemed too easy…
The Aurora, after playfully drawing closer with a dry electric crackle like silk on flesh, thinned. But the rocks around him were still twisting on the gleaming strand, moving, sighing. Confused, he walked over towards them, his sodden feet splashing in deepening rills. One raised itself higher, and he saw a glint of eyes and whiskers before the seals gave their huffing barks and lolloped off towards the ocean.
Boult walked back across the dunes to his cottage. The door, which possessed no lock, swung easily, as if it he hadn’t wedged it properly shut. It was too far past curfew now to try the lightswitch. The furniture sat gently seething. Somehow, the air had a charged presence. He went to his desk, touching one by one the heaps of his papers, studying the position of the stones he’d laid over them, feeling them to see if they were cold. He glanced quickly behind him. The pictures hanging from the walls. It was all too neat, too innocent…
He pushed open the door to his bedroom, where a rising moon hung at the window, and studied the phenomena of his bed from every possible angle. The sheets were rucked, pushed, changed. And in their centre, long and indented from the feet right up to the pillow, lay the imprint of a body. Touching that moonlit hollow, Boult found that it was warm.
The coffin turned lazily in the sunlight above the harbour. Boult, the two dockers who were guiding it, and a few circling gulls, were the scene’s only witnesses. It wasn’t roped particularly well, and tilted down by ten or fifteen degrees. Which is the heavier end of the body? The head, Boult supposed. A shout, a thumbs up, and the coffin was lowered into the rusty shadows of the trawler’s hold. Just a long oblong of cardboard stencilled with numbers but no name. After all, what was the purpose of identity when all you were left with could, after some suitable ghastly process in a mainland plant, be usefully returned to soil of the commune farm. The rest of the trawler’s crew were arriving. Those same sun-scarred faces he’d seen in the White Tree. Climbing ladders. Exchanging incomprehensible shouts. The ancient diesel engine started coughing like the near-broken thing it was. The ropes were cast. Boult watched the trawler as it chugged around the headland, leaving nothing but a oily cloud.
This morning, the idea of a visitation at his cottage seemed almost as unlikely as the prospect that he’d write anything when he sat down at his desk. But he’d tried anyway. escape salt cherries Another sheet to add to all the others. Then he’d spent a couple of hours tidying, scrubbing the sink, liberating those photos of the lost beauties of the mainland from their patina of dust. It only struck him afterwards that he was giving his cottage a spring clean in preparation for a new occupant.
He walked back up from the harbour and into the village, where the early afternoon shadows were blue against the walls of the houses. He’d come here with the idea of having it out with Roberts, but now he realised that what he really wanted was for things to go on exactly as they were. It wasn’t so bad, after all, being here—was it? He was sitting on the chewed stump of the old monument in main square when the call of a voice started him.
“Citizen?”
It was the girl he’d seen the night before last at the White Tree, and she was heading across the square towards him from the library’s swinging doors.
“You are citizen Boult, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“I know you must be very busy, but if you have a few moments, there’s something in library I’d like to show you.”
Too surprised to protest, Boult stood up and followed her back through the doors and the clacking turnstile into a dusty darkness which whispered with the scattered coughs and sighs of the other writers who had retreated from the sun to pretend to work here. A loop of keys jingled at the polished blue seat of the girl’s trousers. Her wrists stuck far out from the frayed sleeves of her jacket as, all jittery excitement, she waved her hands. “I was checking up some of yesterday’s cards. It was the Northern Lights you were researching, wasn’t it…?” Her voice had dropped to a sibilant whisper which still carried too far. One or two sour looks were aimed her way by the half-roused sleepers in their booths. “I’m afraid there’s more than was shown you by my college…”
He followed her along the creaking corridors, then up some spiral stairs.
“You’re new here?”
The hands fluttered again and she nearly spilled a handful of chits and cards as she nodded. “…I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to everything. It must be so marvellous…” Boult somehow felt sorry for her, to be so young, and to be living in these times. Even here. She had dark hair, cut in a short and practical citizenly way that meant she could work a hand lathe or a farm implement safely, and that you could see the delicate curve of her neck, the small pink lobes of her ears. “I’m Citizen Gloria, and The Furnace is almost my favourite book of all time. But don’t get me started on that.”
Only almost. And there was something else, too, about that smile, those eyes. More than youth. Citizen Gloria. Such an unlikely and old-fashioned, and thus inappropriate, name. Or was that the extra twist of verisimilitude which amounted for reality, that real people in this real world didn’t have the names they probably should? Boult’s writerly instinct for such things had long left him. All he felt was confused. And what if Hibbert was right, and she’d been brought here to liven up the choice of widows down in their bungalows? Or as a treat solely for him, for supposedly finishing his book? But the trawler had arrived the night before he’d told Roberts that the sequel—successor, dammit—to The Furnace was finally done…
Citizen Gloria was climbing a ladder to get to the very upper lip of a huge, gently groaning bookcase.
“You see,” she said, looking down at him, her face shadowed by a moss-mottled skylight. “Some aspects of the same subject can be correctly categorised in several quite different places. I got special authority to check in something called a microfiche. Phenomena of the higher atmosphere can be regarded as meteorology stroke climatology, or up here out of the atmosphere entirely in outer space.”
“So this is your very first day?”
“Oh yes!” The whole bookcase seemed to sway. She wasn’t even whispering now. As Boult blinked and rubbed his eyes, she drew out book after book and somehow hooked into them in the crook of her elbow before she descended, almost glided, down the ladder.
“Do you know who it is you’ve replaced?”
“A citizen called Stick, Styke…?”
“Styche.”
“That’s it! There was some accident apparently… Not long ago. He fell. Off…” She gestured to the ladder, which she’d left propped
against the bookcase, as Styche, for all his many faults would never have done. “…something like this. You can’t be too careful, can you, and being a librarian is a surprisingly dangerous occupation. But these things sometimes happen, no matter what precautions the State takes.”
“I saw Styche yesterday.” Boult said. “He brought me a book on the upper atmosphere.”
Gloria’s eyes, her mouth, widened. “But that means he was still alive when I…” Just like her name, it was impossible to tell if her reaction was fake or genuine. “No wonder people have been so sniffy about me—”
But Boult had already turned from her, the offered books ignored, and was heading for the library exit. Which, long thought he’d been here on this island, took him some time to find.
The air smelled of gorse and the sheep were baaing as he stumbled back across the island through the warm afternoon. He felt cheated and drained from that encounter with citizen Gloria—or whatever her real name was. But she was dangerous to him. He knew that much. Sometimes, you just had to trust your addled instincts.
When he crossed the final rise, he saw that watchman Roberts’ car was parked outside his cottage. If he hadn’t felt so tired, he’d have turned and run back toward the library.
“Knew you wouldn’t be long.” Roberts was sitting inside, waiting in the same chair he’d sat in yesterday, enjoying a cuppa from the same chipped primrose mug. He at had his briefcase and a large sheaf of papers balanced on his knees. He smiled at the creak of the door. “I saw you coming out of the library from the window of my office. I thought I’d catch up with you on the road, give you a lift the rest of the way.”
“I walked along the coast.”
“Obviously.” He raised his mug. “Help yourself, by the way. I left enough in the pot.”
“I’m not thirsty.” Boult tried to flick a casual glance towards his desk, but after the sudden change from daylight outside, all he saw were swarming blotches. He sat down, trying not to shiver, hating himself for this ridiculous nervousness. He’d often felt this way as a child. At school, with the citizen teachers. Sometimes at home with his citizen parents. Always with Party representatives. When you were young, you comforted yourself with the thought that you would grow out of such things. His hands started to sweat as he faced Roberts. It was intensely disappointing. Even as adults, he thought, we still harbour the illusion that the imminence of death will finally bring a loosening of some of the chains which tie us.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 34
