Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  Our Lost Atlantis. It won’t really be like that, I know, but I used to love that song. Even when the busy, pulsing city was all around us and we were at an age where we could roam all over it and experience its delights as the fancy took us, it still seemed much more vivid and magical when the song imagined it for us as if it was already beneath the waves, as they say the lower parts really will be, in less than a century’s time, including the National Assembly building and Temple Park. That song allowed you to feel nostalgia for something that still existed, which is perhaps as close as you can get to being ‘there’ at the same time as being ‘here’. Nostalgia for something that’s still here: these days I have that feeling a lot, and I don’t even need songs to help me.

  I open up my notebook. I leaf through the pages in which I’ve already written sketches and notes for the latest iteration of my novel. I have dozens of these notebooks back in my flat and in a way they did become books, because all of the books I’ve written have been off-shoots from this process. But I know inside myself that each one resulted from an act of betrayal and only got written when I turned away from my original objective and headed off in a completely different direction to the one I’d intended. Like revolutions and religions, they only succeeded by surrendering to the very forces that they were supposed to transcend. But I keep trying. I am reasonably well for my age, apart from the arthritis. The heavy smoking of my youth has so far not caught up with me. I could easily have another ten years in me before I reach my dotage, and that surely is plenty of time.

  I turn to a blank page and begin to write.

  ‘If a story consists of a number of scenes or elements, one might think that a tragic story was one in which most of those elements were painful, and only a few happy, while a happy story was one in which only a few were painful and most were cheerful. But that isn’t actually how it works. A story in which the main character is wretched for most of it but finds resolution at the end is a happy story. A story in which the main character is happy for most of it, but is then undone in some way in the final pages is tragic, even though the sum total of happiness is greater in this second story than in the first, and the sum of sorrow is less. So in fact it’s the order in which the elements occur that’s important rather than the relative weight of tragic and cheerful episodes. So, for instance . . .’

  One of the adult ducks quacks softly to the other and I pause to watch them. Now that I’ve finished feeding them, they’ve all climbed out on to the bank opposite me, and just in front of the fence, through which I can see the busy street and the row of apartment buildings where I once lived, getting on for half a century ago. The mother is settled comfortably on the ground with the ducklings around her. The father is standing on one leg, having one last look around, before tucking his head under his wing to take a nap. Although I’ve tried to become a little less ignorant about these matters, I still couldn’t say what kind of duck these are, or what habits they have, or where in the world they originally came from, but I do like watching them and remembering that inside each of those small heads is another whole universe, completely inaccessible to me, but nevertheless as real as my own.

  A car honks, very loudly and suddenly, just beyond the fence. It gives me an unpleasant jolt, but the ducks seem not even to notice it. I turn back to my notebook, but I don’t immediately start to write. I’m thinking about the fact that I feel sad if I review my life in date order, because I see wasted opportunities, again and again, and now very few opportunities are left at all, only a steady narrowing of the field of possibilities, and a gradual increase in sources of discomfort, fear and humiliation.

  But who says I have to look at it in such a linear way? If the story of a life were broken down into its different elements, and each one written on a separate card, one could select cards from the pack in different combinations, and every combination of cards could be arranged in different sequences, as I used to do with those old playing cards I had with me in the jungle, with their old-fashioned suits of Coins, Cups, Swords and Leaves. I still have them somewhere in a drawer. Some sequences would undoubtedly meet the criteria for sad stories, and even tragic ones, but others, even if constructed with the exact same cards, could be optimistic tales that left the reader cheered and hopeful when they put down the book at the end.

  I smile. This takes me back to that idea I used to play with of a story presented like a stained-glass window. A story can’t literally do that, obviously, because it’s a line and not a surface, but it can act like the viewer of such a window, who doesn’t look at each element of the story in time order, but glances back and forth between them and extracts from that process an overall effect.

  Someone has come out on to my balcony to smoke. Or what was my balcony. I can’t see from here if it’s a man or a woman, but whoever it is has dark hair and is leaning comfortably on the railings, using one bare foot to rub the calf of the other leg.

  When I wake up he’s in the kitchen, singing along happily to some crappy pop song. He’s frying bacon and brewing coffee – I can smell them, and I can hear the crackle of the fat and the gurgle of the coffee machine. Soon he’s going to bring me my breakfast as a treat, and expect me to be pleased and maybe have sex with him one last time before he has to go off, as he mentioned last night, to a meeting somewhere at nine o’clock. I get out of bed, and, grabbing my coat to cover my nakedness, I open the glass door that leads out on to a tiny balcony. The icy air blasts in. I’m ten floors up. The sky is a pale grey that’s almost white. To my right is a building site where a gigantic construction crane is lowering a girder on to a structure that will soon become a tower just like the one I’m in. It’s well below freezing out here, and the balcony’s floor is numbingly cold against my bare feet. Beyond the harbour wall, long lines of grey waves are rolling in, one after another after another.

  ‘Let all the warm air out, why don’t you?’ Ham says as he arrives with the tray. Back in the kitchen, one of those local-radio DJs is witlessly babbling about nothing in what he seems to imagine is a humorous and sexy voice.

  I come back into the room, closing the doors behind me. ‘That looks nice,’ I manage to say, though I don’t feel like eating at all.

  ‘Well, it’s not every day I get to wake up with a famous—’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, leave it, will you?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And don’t you dare make another joke about “poetry”.’

  ‘You’ve woken up in a grumpy mood!’

  I can’t bear him. I can’t bear the thought that I’m here with him and that last night we were naked and all over each other. I know it’s not fair. I know that in fact he’s a nice man, and in his own way a thoughtful one, who just happens not to have been socialized into the same kind of milieu as me and my friends, but there it is, I can’t bear him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say with an effort. ‘There was no call for that.’

  ‘This was a mistake, you’re thinking?’

  ‘Yes. My fault. I knew it would be and went ahead anyway, so it’s my fault entirely. I suppose I was dreading a night alone. But, I mean, it was only two days ago that I last woke up beside Amanda. A bit too soon for . . .’

  I sit on the bed, and look down at the spread he’s arranged for me on a tray: a plate of bacon and those seaweed-flavoured potato cakes that are the local speciality, a cup of coffee, and a glass of orange juice, along with a single plastic rose in a tiny vase, which I suppose he thought I would appreciate as a gesture of tenderness. Perhaps he keeps it in a drawer for these occasions.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t think I can eat this.’

  ‘Never mind. I should have asked you.’

  I place the tray on the floor and reach out to him. ‘Have you got time to . . .?’

  ‘Well . . . yes, if you’re sure, but is that a good idea if, you know . . .?’

  ‘It’s a terrible idea, but it puts off the moment when I’ll be able to see that.’

  ‘That doesn’t ma
ke a lot of sense.’

  ‘Ha. No it doesn’t. But you must admit there’s a certain po—’

  ‘Hey! If I’m not allowed to make that joke, then nor are you. Why don’t you drink the coffee, and eat whatever you can manage, and then we can both get dressed, and say goodbye.’

  I’m thinking of making a journey. It’s not without its dangers. There’s a real chance of serious injury and even death. But sometimes you have to take risks. And if I’m going to do it, I feel I should do it now and by myself, though I could quite easily wait for someone else to do it for me. A quest isn’t a quest unless you yourself climb the perilous tower.

  There’s a fair amount of planning involved, though it’s important not to spend too long over it because the window of opportunity is narrow. I need to work out, first of all, the best way of levering myself into a sitting position. There are a number of possible strategies, and I must choose carefully in order to put myself in the optimal position for initiating the next move, which involves getting both feet on the floor. After that, the big question is how best to stand up (something I haven’t attempted on my own for many months), while minimizing the risk of losing my balance before I’m able to get my hands on my walking frame. This will be the most dangerous moment by far, at least until I reach my destination, because I wouldn’t be able to get myself up from the floor, and, more to the point, I’m almost certain to break something. My bones are extremely brittle these days, and it’s no fun lying for several hours on the floor with a broken bone, as I’ve already had occasion to find out. This mission of mine is like driving along a bumpy road in a car that’s made of glass and has seriously defective brakes.

  But I’m not quite ready to stop doing anything at all. These rails next to my bed should help. My arms aren’t too bad, actually, or better than the rest of me, anyway, and I can make them do most of the work. It’s going to hurt, not just in my joints, but inside me where the worst pain always is, and where the thing is slowly growing that I know will kill me, but I’m going to press ahead in any case.

  Honk honk. Peep peep. Parp parp. Four storeys down, the afternoon traffic is muttering and squabbling. How far away all of that is! How remote from me! No one knows I’m up here. And no one down there, I’m pretty sure, has ever embarked on a journey such as this, or has any real conception of what it would be like.

  It’s not just that I’m far above them, either, because I’m also in the past. Things have changed down there in ways that I no longer understand. Manners are different, mores are different, politics are different. Things that we thought were the final truth have turned out to be foolish errors. Things that we didn’t even imagine have become part of everyday life. For instance, when the foreign women come to wash me and change my diaper, they sometimes have to speak to their head office, but when they do they don’t take a phone out of their pocket as we would have done, they just narrow their eyes and speak into the air in front of them. I’ve no idea how that works, but they seem completely at home with it, just as we were with our phones, because they’re already inhabiting tomorrow, while I’m still stuck in today. Not that they’d see it that way, of course. This is today as far as they’re concerned, and I’m far behind in yesterday.

  Enough prevarication. I must concentrate. It’s time to put my feet on the floor.

  The bats are heading out to hunt. Carlo is keeping watch at the mouth of the cave. He’s smoking and brooding out there, as I imagine it, pondering his next move in the complex multiplayer game that, from what I’ve overheard, carries on constantly between the various FRENALAT factions. Rubia, Jaco and Guinevere have been playing cards but have begun to bicker, Rubia and Jaco amusing themselves for a while by mocking the posh city accent that Guinevere has worked so hard to suppress.

  Then Jaco comes up with a new game. A while ago he brought some long sticks down the cave with the view to whittling them into spears, a project he soon grew tired of, but now he has the idea of using them to swipe at the bats. Rubia joins in and soon the two of them are shouting and laughing as they leap and lash about. Guinevere pointedly declines to join in, picking up one of her books and pretending to lose herself in it, as she so often does.

  Most of the bats are too high up to reach, but eventually Jaco manages to knock down one of them that foolishly flew too low, and he and Rubia begin a new game of tormenting the animal by yelling abuse at it and prodding it with their sticks as it flops about on the ground, unable to get away. I suppose one of its wings is broken, or possibly the creatures are just unable to take off from the ground. My father would know. All I have to go on is that I don’t recall ever hearing of a bat that could walk.

  Guinevere continues to pretend to read, frowning as if with intense concentration, and huddling closer to the book all the time as if she was trying to disappear into its pages completely. But eventually she’s unable to contain herself and flings it to the ground.

  ‘What’s it ever done to you, you cruel bastards?’ she says, and interestingly her voice has lost all traces of the Upper River way of speaking she’s been trying to acquire, and has all the authority and privilege of our class.

  The two of them do stop, though with poor grace. ‘We’re only having a bit of fun,’ mutters Jaco.

  ‘It’s just an animal, for Christ’s sake,’ grumbles Rubia. ‘It’s just a dirty little sky rat.’

  Guinevere stands and goes over to the creature, which is no longer flopping about, but is still alive and trembling. She squats down to inspect it, and then stands up and, after what looks like a brief struggle with herself, she stamps down hard on its head, inspects it again to ensure that it’s dead, and then returns without a word to her book.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Rubia. ‘Talk about taking the hump.’

  Jaco looks a little more guilty – it’s because he hates the idea that he’s disappointed Guinevere, I think, rather than any remorse about the animal itself – but he puts a good face on it.

  ‘God, I’m bored,’ he says. ‘I’m going to go and see what Carlo’s doing.’

  ‘Good idea,’ says Rubia. ‘Old misery here can stew by herself.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Jaco, jerking a thumb in my direction. ‘Or maybe go and chat to her best buddy there in the cage.’

  Rubia laughs loudly, Jaco glances uncomfortably at both Guinevere and me, and then Rubia switches on a torch and the two of them head off towards the cave mouth.

  ‘At least take the bat with you then,’ Guinevere calls after them. ‘We don’t want it rotting down here.’

  ‘Bury it, if it bothers you,’ Rubia calls back, and Jaco looks back uneasily but doesn’t stop.

  Guinevere continues to pretend to read until I speak to her. ‘They’re pretty heartless, your friends, aren’t they?’

  She looks up. ‘They’re hard because they have to be. We’re soft because we grew up letting other people do all the nasty things for us. It’s nothing to feel smug about.’

  ‘No, I agree. But those are the people you want to put in charge. Those are the people you claim are going to usher in a kinder, fairer world.’

  She glances towards the cave mouth to check that the others are out of sight, and them comes over to squat down next to my cage.

  ‘Why are you so determined to prove that nothing can make any difference? Are you really so happy with the world as it is?’

  ‘No, of course not. But the way I see it, there is kindness and there is generosity, but there’s also cruelty and selfishness, and I can’t help thinking there always will be, whether I like it or not. There isn’t some kind of sunlit tomorrow where those things have ceased to exist.

  ‘Hello? Anyone there?’

  No answer. I grasp the handle and push. The door creaks open. The upper room of the tower is full of complicated light. Of the large windows that completely surround it, half are filled with clear glass, and the other half with coloured designs. There is a patterned carpet on the floor, overlaid by the brighter patterns projected through the glass
, and straight in front of me there’s a tomb, such as the ones in the chapter house of the cathedral back in the city, with a statue of some dead knight, or bishop, or wealthy merchant, lying prone along the top of it, except that in this case the rich fabrics with which the tomb is draped appear to be real, and not just carved out of stone and then painted.

  And then, just like in the stories my brothers used to tell to frighten me, the dead knight moves. He turns his great head. He opens his bruised-looking, cavernous eyes, and he looks straight at me.

  ‘Who are you, and what are you doing here?’ he says, speaking in the odd foreign-sounding accent that I’ve already heard in the village. With a grunt of pain and effort, he levers himself stiffly into a sitting position. He must be in his mid-seventies at least, but his eyes are sharp and full of energy. He reaches for a walking stick that’s propped at the end of his couch, and brings it in front of him so he can rest his hands on its pommel. He’s wearing a kind of robe.

  I tell him who I am, and how I came to be here in his valley, and how the people in the village have been very kind to me.

  ‘Didn’t they tell you that the tower was private and holy?’

  ‘Yes, they did. They told me I was welcome to come and have a look at it, but I shouldn’t go inside. I’m afraid I—’

  ‘You’re afraid you decided to ignore that?’

  ‘I’m very sorry, but they told me that this was where you kept the Holy Grail, and curiosity got the better of me.’