Boult groaned and covered his aching head. His bladder ached, too. Such had been his eagerness that he hadn’t even found the time to piss before he’d sat at this desk. But now, in the space of however long it had taken him to shuffle across the floor of this little cottage, all the joy of creativity had been transformed into the sheer brick wall of having nothing at all to say. Through kneading fingertips, he studied some of the sheets which he’d filled in all his years of wasted effort. Train pain rain. System object loose lose lost. Even as random jottings, they seemed impossibly trite. He groaned again as his other hand went down to press the sour ache of his unemptied bladder through his thin striped pyjamas. Then he heard a scrape at the entrance to the cottage. He started and turned.
The door, already drifting ajar, swung the rest of the way open into the bright morning and light poured around the figure which stood there in black silhouette. Gloria, surely? It was as if she’d never left, and as if the black shadow which streamed over him and blocked the bright sea air was the only possible escape.
He jerked his hands away from his head and crotch. “I was just—”
“None of my business, old fellow.” It was merely Hibbert’s thick voice. Merely Hibbert’s bulky shape. “A man’s entitled to do whatever he’d entitled. Even on the mainland, the committees haven’t taken that away. Not yet, anyway.”
“I wasn’t…” But what did it matter? Clutching the waistband of his pyjamas, Boult stood up and shuffled off toward the toilet, muttering that he wouldn’t be more than a minute. Which, of course, he was, seeing as processes far more basic than the act of writing were starting to become a strain.
When he came out again, Hibbert was standing over his desk and shamelessly flicking thorough his manuscript. Page to page to page.
“Well…” he sighed. “You weren’t wrong when you said told me you hadn’t exactly finished your novel. I’m surprised Roberts has been so trusting.” He re-settled the papers, weighing them down with Boult’s customary slabs of slate. “When are you actually going to show this nonsense to him and admit that the game is up? Tomorrow? Today…?”
“I don’t know.” Boult slumped down in his armchair and rearranged the open crotch of his pyjamas. He noted that the offer of borrowing Hibbert’s latest parody of something resembling a novel had gone. “Does it matter?”
The frown deepened on Hibbert’s face. “There’ll be repercussions, you know. And not just for you. They’ll set up some new committee and make every writer submit whatever they’re working on for inspection and approval on a monthly basis. There’ll be rubber stamps and extra forms and we’ll all be required to use the same kind of paper and write legibly even in the roughest draft. Things won’t be the same after this. This island, it’s like what the priests used to describe as heaven before we had them all lynched. We’re just so incredibly, incredibly—”
“Yes. I know. Lucky.”
“And poor old Roberts. It’s not going to look good for him.”
“I really don’t think—”
“He’s still a human being. He’s still a citizen. He’s doing his job here like all the rest of us. Or most.”
“What do you want me to say?”
Hibbert went back to the pages, his face twisted with disgust. “You know what they’ll think, don’t you, when they read this? They’ll think it’s some kind of code. That you’ve been communicating with the enemy.”
“But that’s nonsense.”
“When did that ever matter?”
“Perhaps I should just destroy it.” Boult made an effort to get up, but Hibbert glared him down again.
“For God’s sake, don’t do that! That’ll only make it look worse. Whatever it is that they think you’ve got rid of, they want you to tell them every fucking detail of what they think it was. Whether or not you can remember it, or what they think is actually right. And they’ll make sure you tell them as well, believe me.”
Boult sat flattened in his chair. The idea of death was something he’d thought he was almost getting used to, but his mind had stubbornly avoided the obvious fact that he’d suffer prolonged and systematic torture first. “What can I do?”
“You can’t do anything.” Hibbert’s face now bore something resembling sympathy. “The only thing that amazes me is that things have got this far without the authorities realising. Are you absolutely sure they’re not on to you…?”
So this was it. Boult had never given much serious thought to how his time on the island would finally end. Confession, confrontation or betrayal had always seemed too literary, too dramatic a means for a supposed writer who as actually incapable of writing anything to be finally condemned. If he’d imagined anything, it had been a slow fading, for the useless words that he wrote daily on those precious and expensively produced sheets of paper to get thinner and fainter, and him with them, until nothing of either was left. Just an empty space in an empty cottage. A final blank page.
But the best, or the least worse, thing he could do in this situation was something straightforward and positive for change. Still, as he walked over the headland towards the village and the changing breezes tugged and fluttered at his clutched manuscript, he still felt pale and faint. But Hibbert was right. Prevarication would make this worse for everyone. Going straight to the State offices this morning was exactly what any diligent citizen would do. Assuming—and it was a big assumption—that any diligent citizen would have allowed himself to slide into this ridiculous mess in the first place.
No boats in the harbour. Clouds drifting above their leviathan shadows across a white-flecked near-turquoise ocean. The mossed slate roofs. The once-white plaster. The cry of the gulls. Would they allow him back to his cottage? Of course they wouldn’t. Taking in his last sight of everything, Boult walked down into the village. Clarkie was sluicing out last night’s detritus from the White Tree’s open door with a mop and bucket. Seeing Boult passing, and no doubt noticing that he had the pages of the famous and much-anticipated manuscript bunched fluttering in his arms, he gave a cheery thumbs-up.
So this was it. Boult entered the main square with the library and the State offices facing each other from across the chewed stump of the ruined plinth. He was glad he’d got here early. The State offices had only just opened, and there was no one else about, and the building’s heavy doors held for a moment, as if surprised that he wanted to come inside. Then they gave.
It was so dark inside that he stood blinking for a minute as if he’d tumbled into a cave. Cracked walls, damp-stained ceilings. A sense of strained endeavour, of unrinsed sweat, tired floor polish and poor drains. It all poured around him a slow and greasy embrace. The mainland wasn’t just across the water, he decided. It had always been here on his island, waiting to draw him in.
“Citizen…? Boult…? Is that you?”
He looked around for the source of the voice along the many corridors which seemed to drop away from him, and cringed as a figure approached.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so, terribly—”
“Boult—it’s me. Citizen Gloria. What’s the matter? Why are you here?”
“This manuscript,” he stammered, trying to push her away. “You’ve got to let me deliver it.”
“Why on earth shouldn’t I? But wait, wait… I—I mean you—I mean we—we haven’t yet fixed on a title. And why are you suddenly so upset? I thought we were getting somewhere last night with the things you were saying to me. I thought we were nearly there. Can’t we just talk for a minute first?”
Boult was still clutching the manuscript to his chest as she led back out from the State offices and across the bright square.
“Best if we go in here.” Another dark doorway, even if it was just the library. “Come on…” she eased him through its threshold like a nervous horse and on past the clank of the turnstile into the more familiar darkness. He obediently followed her along the quiet aisles.
“So,” she said matter-of-factly, her hands on her hips as if she was about t
o tell him off, “this is supposed to be a great day, and I still don’t understand what’s worrying you. Is it really just the book’s title? Has some committee on the mainland decided to come up with one for you that you don’t like? I mean, I may be fairly new to this game, but I do know these things happen. The state always fills in the blanks for you, if you ever leave any kind of space on a form, and not always in a good way. Why, I heard of someone who forgot to tick the box which said male or female on a requisition for a cot when they were pregnant, and the next thing was—”
“What were you doing in the state offices?”
She looked around for moment as if searching for inspiration along the lines of cracked spines which slumped along the shelves. She pursued her cherry mouth. “I was just taking some forms to be collated. Books viewed, number of visitors. Someone has to do it every morning. You know how these things work. Even libraries have five year plans.”
“So you are a librarian?”
“What else do you think I am?”
He shook his head. “I really don’t know. But no, it isn’t the title, Gloria, or anything that you said or did last night. It’s…” He held the manuscript out. “Here.”
“Can I look at it—your new book?” Her gaze was awed. When she took the pages from him, they trembled in her hands almost as much as they had in his.
“But it’s not a book, Gloria. It’s nothing. It’s just random lines…”
She smoothed the ruffled first page with her fingers. He thought she’d just glance at the top sheet, realise what he meant, and glare back at him like Hibbert. But instead she studied the words for some time. He could tell from the travel of her eyes that she was actually trying to read them.
“This is… Very interesting and strange…” She muttered eventually. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but can I have an hour or two to look at it properly?”
“Why…? You mean now? In here?”
“Why not?” She smiled. “After all, if a great author’s new work isn’t safe in a library, where is it…?”
Boult sat. Boult stood. Boult waited. Boult wandered the derelict alleys of library shelves. Boult coughed and wheezed like all the other lost and lonely writers who were slowly settling into their accustomed places for another day at the coalface of the strange endeavour of making up things. And what was the need for more of this nonsense, anyway, when so much of it already existed? Boult balled his hands into fists as he prowled past endless titles, tomes, words, fictions, lies. Whole lifetimes of endeavour. And what did it really matter, he asked himself, if a particular novel consisted of nothing but a disassociated jumble of meaningless letters, when it all meant so little anyway? He took down a volume of supposed non-fiction, let it fall open. Fable. Took down another, let it fall open in the same way. Experimented. None of even those kind of books made any sense—not when you studied them in this clear and objective fashion. Just more nonsense filtered down to its citizens by the State. And critics were just critics, and readers were just readers, and committees, when all was said and done, were only committees, and death was just death, and pain was simply pain.
She was taking an extraordinarily long time. He looked around along falling aisles—the dusty ruins, the broken pillars, the spills of fallen pages which would never be catalogued in this or any other lifetime, lying like heaps of desiccated birds. She was probably reporting him already. In fact, the whole thing was an obvious ruse by the authorities to get him to pass the book into their hands. He was amazed at himself for not having realised. He imagined his pointless words being frowned over, analysed, discussed, until they had lost even their sense of being rudimentary strings of letters conveying thought and sound.
Whatever citizen Gloria and watchman Roberts and all the rest of them were now doing, it was bound to turn out terribly for him. Would they really think that those pages were some kind of code, or would they simply decide that he was mad? Code meant that he would be treated as a spy, which was bad enough, but he had no illusions how citizens who had lost the regular habits of a clean and civic mind were treated on the mainland. The cold immersions. The sanitary cleansings. The electric prods. The invasive techniques. The kinds of torture in white rooms he’d feared until a few moments ago that his life would soon be ended by, but infinitely prolonged.
He thought of running—fleeing the library. But where could he go? On this island, there was no escape. That was the cleverest thing that the State had done here to its all writers. It had given those tricky and unpredictable beings all the things that they all claimed they wanted. It had given them peace and quiet. It had given them paper and ink. It had given them time and space and, yes, just a little glory. And it had pushed them all together into the arid vacuum of this bleak paradise so that they could squabble and bicker and preen and walk and talk and read and drink their beer and fuck their matrons and do whatever else it was they claimed they wanted until it all lay far beyond their hearts’ content.
In his agitated wanderings, Boult had reached the part of the library which he and his colleges all normally avoided, for it contained their own work. There it was, on a middle shelf. A single copy of The Furnace. He eased it out, attempted to study the printing history on the first of its splayed pages, then the lending stamps and the library catalogue entry, but too much was obscured by the many stains, marks and creases. He ran his finger along the drift of sand and dark marine matter which had accreted within its wrinkled spine. The thing smelled oddly salty, and felt thickly damp—less a book, more like some ancient, soft-shelled mollusc which had crawled out from the sea.
The person who’d written this book wasn’t the Boult who’d wasted all these years on this island. This was the work of a young, vibrant man who knew less but cared a great deal more about the world. He remembered the cold nights, the struggles to find ink and paper, the aching eyes and fingers, the hopeless hope that he might be creating something out of nothing—then the scratch of the frozen soap across his face from the morning bucket. How frail the real world had then seemed! How laughably thin and quaintly pathetic compared to the things he’d felt and witnessed on the page!
The dark corridors of the island library had that same insubstantiality now as he looked up at them. So did Citizen Gloria as she approached him.
“I hadn’t read this in years.” He held out his copy of The Furnace.
“That copy rather looks as if it’s seen better days. But this…” She was holding the heavy sheaf to her breast, and she was smiling. “…this…”
Boult found himself sinking, falling. Had the pages somehow transformed themselves? Was this some miracle or curse? “You didn’t actually try to read it, did you?”
“Well, actually, I did. It’s bonkers, isn’t it? It’s beyond anything that even the most decadent enemy writer would ever dare to create.”
To hear her say that was almost a relief. “So you’re not pretending to say it has any literary merit?”
“No, but… well, it is rather hypnotic. And was telling myself for the first few pages that it was just a preamble, an experiment, and the fog would start to clear. But after that, I began to feel disappointed. And then, if I’m honest Boult, rather bored.”
Which was, he thought, the kindest review his supposed successor to The Furnace was ever likely to get.
“I suppose you could dress it up as some sort of brave experiment, but that won’t play with the committees and the censors,” she said. “You know how they like their art—simplistically realistic and stupidly linear. Books that read like train timetables—which are, of course, far greater works of fiction over on the mainland than the books themselves. Paintings that should be photographs. Songs you can beat a hammer to so you don’t have to hear. Drama that would disgrace a kitchen sink.”
“So at least you see my problem?”
“Yes. You’re a great writer who’s been blocked for far too long by the petty restrictions and brutal threats.”
Boult glance over his shoulder, then thr
ough the gaps in the books at the adjoining aisles. Libraries were notoriously bad places for risky conversation. “You can’t say that.”
“But I just have. The Furnace is a work of genius and is loved the world over.”
“You’re think people read my book beyond the mainland?”
“Of course they do. And better understand and enjoy it for the masterpiece it is. That’s what proper freedom means, Boult. You’re seen beyond this dreadful country for what you really are—a great man, a great writer. Just like Kilbracken—”
“Kilbracken?!”
Gloria smiled. “I’m sorry. I never said that freedom gives everyone perfect taste. But you’re the reason I agreed to come here and offer you a chance.”
“A chance for what?”
“The chance to escape.”
She took his hand and drew him even deeper into the library. Opened what looked to be a cupboard door with one of her keys. Pressed the lightswitch as she leaned it shut, which, somewhat surprisingly, caused many lines of bulbs to glow across a wide, and entirely un-dampstained, ceiling. Not so much a cupboard as another, only slightly smaller, library with lines of shelves in neat arrays.
“What is this place?”
“It’s where all the books which have been deemed unsuitable are stored.”
“I thought we writers here on this island already had special access to those.”
She gave him a pitying look. “That isn’t really how you think it works, is it? You lot are just given the dribs, the drabs, the leavings. The real stuff is kept in here.”
Boult inspected some of the nearby shelves, which were far better ordered than any library he’d ever seen. “But I recognise some of these works. I’m sure they’re still available.”
“Of course they are, but only in redacted and re-censored form. Some books have been through the same process many times, The Furnace included. That’s often why, when you try to re-read something you enjoyed years before, it’s nothing like as good as you remember it to be. But that doesn’t happen where I’m from, Boult. People are free to read, and write, and say, whatever they want.”
Everywhere: Volume I of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod Page 36
