“We’ll need to go through all of this, I’m afraid…” Roberts was teasing out the first of his sheaf of papers. He unscrewed the top of his pen. He flashed another smile. “I’ll act as scribe for a change, shall I?”
A state publishing requisition. Pages and pages and pages of it, which, he explained, would be copied and divided and re-copied and sent to all the relevant bureaux, factories, committees and library, cultural censorship authorities. Boult had no recollection of anything this complex happening when The Furnace was accepted, but that had been more than twenty years ago, and forms and procedures never stayed the same. It was the State’s way of making sure that you always had to read every single instruction, and still probably got things wrong.
The rest of the afternoon ticked by to the sound of the little licks and spits as Roberts and his pen worked through the requisition’s many pages. Stupid of Boult, not to have realised this was coming. After all, there were requisitions for everything. Broom handles. Cogs. Shoes. Paving slabs. Cardboard coffins. Anything that the State doled out or took away came wrapped up in its own complex bit of paper. Probably, no undoubtedly, there’d be requisitions for matrons, and for the lads Kilbracken liked to spend his summers with. And for new librarians. They’d do it with clouds, and raindrops and the laughing breath of babies, if only they could identify the correct batch number. Compared to such dreamy things, books were solid and real and ordinary; inky products of the pounding acres of some run-down mainland factory. Name? Address? Party number? It was like call and response, one of the oldest forms of song and poetry. Have you at any time been treated for the following diseases? Boult’s problem as a writer, he decided, was that he come to this island too early, before he’d had a chance to absorb the oddities of mainland life. This whole process still seemed ridiculous to him when it plainly shouldn’t.
“Any special skills and stroke or qualifications?”
“Are you sure this is the right form?”
“Oh, we’ll get to the actual book in a minute. Obviously, and as with any activity in life, it’s important that the authorities have a full picture of your role and value to the state as a citizen as well as a writer.”
“I did attend a people’s academy for two years. I gained the appropriate certificate in Understanding Political Analysis… No, I think it was Analysing Political Understanding. Or was it The Politics of Analysis?”
Roberts looked up, his moustache twitching, a vague flush of interest in his red-rimmed eyes. Boult—a political animal? It soon faded. “So you’re not sure… All that effort and labour by your co-workers to get you to a fine place like that, and you can’t even remember what you’ve studied…” This, the vulpine smile which followed assured him, was a joke. “I’m sure we can look that bit up.”
Boult nodded. An odd layer of calm had settled through him during this ritual. Death, he imagined, would be a similar process. And the State would never let you go without the right papers. Soon, they were moving into the part of the form which actually dealt with the book Boult had supposedly written. Size and type of paper? Presumed level and accuracy of spelling? Boult wished he’d had a form like this years ago. Broken down to this level of detail, a novel really did seem like something you could requisition like toilet paper. More so, seeing as to produce a few precious sheets of gritty grey paper out of thin air, even over a period of many years, would be an act of genuine magic. Whereas a book…
“Number of chapters?”
Boult could picture it. Chapter 1—the crisp proclamation of a story worth telling. Flick through and you came to—Chapter 24? No, too long. Chapter 16? Too short. 18 was too mathematical. A novel, after all, was essentially a flawed thing. It flowed with the tides of passion and grief.
“There are nineteen chapters.” A good prime number. Indivisible by anything.
“Good. Good…” Robert’s pen ticked, annotated, moved on down the page. “Now, the names of the main characters. Party numbers, it says here, aren’t necessary, although suitable dummies can be provided by the census office on submission of the appropriate form.”
Boult opened his mouth, expecting nothing to come out. But the one skill he’d acquired in on this island was bullshitting about the book he was supposedly writing, and this somehow felt like more than bullshit. Here it was, the book that he’d longed to produce, risen from the uncertainties to number exactly 2,100 handwritten pages. Long, of course, but then long was to be expected after all this time. Hero? A young man, yes, and his upbringing is difficult. His father, at an age he can barely remember, is arrested, taken away… Robert’s eyebrows went up at that, but Boult was in his stride by now, and he knew the nature of every question that the book would raise, and how they would all be answered. Every character was clear cut to him. What, he wondered, had happened to those failed efforts of creation which had struggled out of the vats of his imagination with their scarred and seared faces, both nameless and many-named, with their many-coloured eyes, their hair falling out, their waving, changing, limbs and deformities growing and melting like wax?
As twilight settled in, Roberts ticked and signed the form’s penultimate page. “Now. One last thing, and I know you’d probably been wondering when this would come up. Although you’ve had the patience not to ask…”
The watchman’s freckles were more prominent. Like the dots and boxes and lines on the form on his lap, they drifted gently across his face in the failing light.
“We’ll need to give the book a name.”
Boult was conscious of the cooling air wafting in and out of his lungs like sea from a cave. He’d never been happy with The Furnace as a title; it had been the one thing about the book which had never seemed to come right no matter how long he’d agonised and waited. This time, he wanted to get it right. But nothing came.
“That’s the one thing I don’t have yet.”
Watchman Roberts, unconcerned, ticked the appropriate box, squared the many pages of his form and tucked them away into his briefcase. The missing title was, Boult decided, as he lifted himself up from the chair’s sticky leather, exactly the sort of final twist which made the book seem real.
“Would you like me to take the manuscript now?” Roberts asked. “There’s a fire safe in my office.”
“I’ve always felt things were pretty secure here in this cottage.”
“Of course. I understand. And it is still your baby. I’ll come and collect it in a few days. As soon a courier’s been organised from the mainland.”
A few days? How many? But better not to ask.
“Meanwhile, you’ll give the title some thought, won’t you? But not tonight. We can’t let an occasion like this pass entirely uncelebrated. Let me buy you a drink…”
Boult sat beside Roberts in his little car with the window down, breathing the night scent of the hedges. When they pulled up outside it, the White Tree looked oddly empty. Looks like a quiet night, Roberts commented, laying a hand across Boult’s shoulder as he steered him toward it across the grey road. Noticing that even the lights at the pub’s windows were out, Boult suddenly realised what was coming. This, after all, was just another part of the island’s rituals: the hunched shadows crowded behind the door; the breathless near-silence of here-he-comes; the flags and banners which Clarkie always stretched between the beams of the bar when some major work was delivered—the voices, the faces, the cheers, the sour and arid hugs and kisses from all his fellow writers, which exploded around him as soon as he entered the White Tree.
Boult stood on his northerly beach the morning after the long, beery night of celebrating his achievement. The sun was blazing. So was his headache.
Cold foam swirled around the cuffs of his trousers. The mainland looked soft and green today. The hills tugged a few fleeces of cloud. A window winked at him above the intense glitter of the sea. Something was moving out there amid those sweet, famously treacherous currents. Something long, grey, impossibly sleek… A seal, perhaps? But seals were never that big. It let
out a plume of water in a sound that reached him on the chant of the waves. Just a whale, but he thought of those old stories of krakens, sirens, mermaids, enemy submarines.
“Citizen? Excuse me…”
Even seen as a silhouette against the wet white sand, it could only he that girl again from the library. Gloria, or whoever. Boult took a few more steps further into the tugging waters, nearly up to his knees. But she waded in after him. For all its practical cut, her hair still snagged at the corners of the mouth. She picked it away.
“You went off so quickly from the library yesterday.”
“What do you expect?”
“I know. Poor Stiles. Dead man’s shoes…” She had a brown paper bag in her hand. “But what can I do? I’m here now, aren’t I… And I got these.” She held it out. “Sorry if they’re a bit squishy.”
He wanted to refuse, but even citizens on this island had to put up with shortages, and he reached into the bag and took out a hooked bundle of fresh cherries. There was something oddly reminiscent about their soft sweet taste, the contrast with the salt air’s harsh brightness. He spat the stones into his palm, then dropped them into the water.
“I think I may be able to find the answer to your problem, citizen Boult.”
“What problem?”
“The title of your book you’ve just finished. Watchman Roberts had a word with me. He must have been checking the library chits to see what you’d been looking into. Or perhaps he always does that for all the writers. I didn’t ask him…” She took another cherry, span it around in her cheeks, and spat the stone an impressive distance.
“I’m sure I can help. Please? After all, it’s what I’m here for. You will let me, won’t you?”
Boult stole occasional glances at citizen Gloria as they walked out of the waves. She had a pert, plump face, and she seemed almost ridiculously young—but then the young always grow younger, retreating from you like those mainland clouds. And her lips were impossibly red, which reminded him of some poem. But that was the cherries. Was this, Boult wondered, what death looked like? Sensing, misreading his gaze, Gloria flushed slightly and flashed him a smile. To her, he was probably just a walking copy of The Furnace. But oblivion, he supposed, could come in worse forms than to a sunlit beach in the shape of a young female citizen who reminded him so sweetly of all that he’d lost and gained.
“You’re not supposed to take those out, are you?” he asked when he found her standing outside his cottage door with an armload of books that evening.
“Course I’m not.” She breezed past him, cleared a space with her elbows amid the place and plonked them down in the scarred dining table.
“You’ve only just got here to this island. Don’t you even care about your career?”
“But you’re Boult… Don’t you want a title for your book?” She peeled off and dropped her frayed coat to the flagstoned floor. “And it’s so bloody dark in here. Isn’t there any electricity? Isn’t that the whole point of living on this island instead of on the mainland, that you can get on with your work in comfort and without distractions and all the endless powercuts? Isn’t there a lightswitch?”
The tremulous bulb came on. The room seemed odd like this, all the shadows leaning backwards in surprise. Boult hadn’t realised how used he’d grown to sitting in darkness.
“So that’s the famous desk is it?” She lifted a slate, sniffed it, stifled a sneeze, then took up the first page beneath. “Is this a bit of it—the book? How many people have read it so far?”
“No one yet.” Boult snapped the page from her fingers and laid it back down beneath the slate. Through the bicycle wind. Inevitable grin grinding. Fat fart nothing. The streams of his words, in this yellow light, burned up at him.
“Apart from you, you mean.”
“Apart from me.”
“But it is finished?”
“I did a publishing requisition with watchman Roberts here only yesterday…” He gestured to the chair where the man had sat, and where her coat now lay like a shed shin. “So. You said you were here to help me?”
It was so very hard to know what to make of citizen Gloria. The young were so young, and her manner, for that she plainly had read The Furnace and seemed to admire it, was always on the edge of disrespect. Not that he deserved respect, Boult supposed. His own younger self would have thought he was contemptible and lazy. And so would all his old friends, the ones who’d talked endlessly into the night about writing but had never made it, and were now probably dead or chronically disabled by the grind of lives they’d never been able to escape. Just imagine… To think… If we could only… He could still hear the bright cadence of their voices as a hidden counterpoint beneath the words of his strange new creature who had been sent to taunt him.
“There’s a theme,” he heard himself saying. “It flows in and out of the book. Rising, falling—but always there. Those lights you sometimes see here in the sky at night. For the main character, they mean…” Nothing? Everything…?
“So why not just call the book Aurora Borealis?” She pulled a face. “But that’s stupid. How about simply Northern Lights? That sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“It needs to be something else. It’s hard to explain. I’ll know it when I see it.”
Considering she probably wasn’t a real librarian, citizen Gloria had done her research well. Or someone else had done it well for her. The books she’d carried up here to the cottage were full of useful references and suggestions. The northern lights had many names, many traditions. He particularly liked merry dancers, and the zodiacal shine. And he liked the way that many of the vanished behemoths of capitalist literature, whom this island library still gave a tarnished sort of half-life, had struggled to find the words to describe this phenomena. Streamers. Crowns of fiery rays. Birchbark. Silver clouds… Yet it was none of those things, and you could tell that these writers knew that they’d missed the target even as they wrestled to find it. At least Boult was in good company.
He glanced at Gloria as she leaned forward over yet another book under the bare-bulbed light of the cottage. She was still full of quick, excited movements. From this close, he could hear the frayed edges of the cheap blue fabric of her uniform brushing against her skin, could see the curve and shape of her neck where her hair fell forward, and the soft whorls beneath. Looking at her like this, he felt sad in a way which was beyond feeling happy; that old ache, which had once sent him scurrying to his pen, his paper, and was now just the thing in itself. He supposed it was called longing. He remembered nights down in the local town when he was young and even the revolution and the State itself had felt like something of true purpose and human resolve. He remembered laughter and cherry mouths, and the misting of breath on lips, and the soft urgent pressure of bodies against his own beneath broken streetlamps—and all of it vanishing into the deepening dark, until all he was left with was here and now, and a hundred books unwritten, a thousand lives unlived…
Somewhere, somehow, his concentration must have drifted as Gloria bared her precious borrowed publications before him. Drifted so far that, instead of muttering nonsense about the supposed title of a book he’d never written, he found himself talking of lost but real things instead. Just the rantings of some sad old man and unworthy citizen, but Gloria didn’t slam her books and stand up in disgust. If anything, she leaned closer to him. If anything, he felt the give and pressure of her breathing pass cool and salt and intimate as the tide against his face.
“You shouldn’t be sad,” she muttered, her hand across his, her dark eyes searching his gaze. “You’re Boult. You’re a great man. A genius. The whole world—not just this sorry country that we live in—values everything you are, and everything you’ve done, or will ever do…” And then, as if that wasn’t enough, her hand had moved up to caress his cheek, and she kissed him. For all his pained struggles over the years to recall such an experience and set it down like some oasis on the white deserts of many a blank page, he realised he’d entire
ly forgotten what it was like to feel a woman’s lips against his own. And why, anyway, would anyone want to capture such an evanescent thing, when its whole purpose lay in the moment itself? But still, Gloria’s scent and the feel of her lips remained with him long after she’d scooped up her books and pulled on the shed skin of her coat and left. It was still there as he lay in his bed and heard his heart hammering and wondered how it was ever possible for anyone to ever sleep, with the world as wonderful as this surely was.
When he opened his eyes the next morning, Boult almost bounded out of bed. He felt so full of words—brimming with that imponderable something which would only be properly expressed once he’d laid it down like the fluttering of a living butterfly upon a page. Only the sluggishness of his limbs and the dizzyingly bright sunlight threading through his cottage reminded him that he was no longer a young man, was no longer pushing at the doors of recognition and fame, but had somehow stumbled all the way through to whatever lay on the other side—that he’d written The Furnace years before, and because of that he was here on this island from which there was only one possible escape. And that escape wasn’t for him to write something, to suddenly produce the new masterpiece he’d somehow managed to convince watchman Roberts he’d written. The only escape was death.
He was sitting down on the rickety wicker chair beside his scarred and ink-stained desk in his own cottage. Sheer luxury, of course. There were people on the mainland who’d kill for such privileges, were they not all such good citizens. He’d had killed for them himself, or used his own blood to put the necessary words down on the page. He’d had time, opportunity, here on this island even if he’d wasted so much of both that he probably only had one day left.
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 35
