Tomorrow

by Chris Beckett

  But I’ve come this far and I can’t give up now. If I can just complete this manoeuvre successfully, find what I need, and transfer it to the canvas bag that’s attached for this sort of purpose to the front of the frame, I actually don’t even need to make it back as far as the bed, because there’s an armchair between here and there, which is, if anything, slightly easier to transfer to, and is one of those electric ones with a little handset that allows you to move the footrest up and down. To sit up in a chair for a while would make a pleasant change and I’m not sure why I haven’t used it lately. They’re always suggesting it, those foreign women. They’re always offering to help me there. I am very stubborn, I’m afraid. That jealous, spiteful feeling rises up inside me, and I end up refusing offers of help that would actually be to my own benefit. The stupid part is that it makes no difference to them at all whether I say yes or no. They aren’t the slightest bit offended when I refuse. They just shrug and say, ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ and then give me my meds, wash and change me on the bed, and head off to wherever it is they go in that mysterious world out there where it’s already tomorrow, so that the only person I’ve spited is myself. I’m a fool like that, and always have been, but sometimes the little comforts and consolations that people kindly offer me seem so small and so trivial compared with what I’ve lost, that they almost feel insulting.

  Anyway, never mind that. Stay focused, that’s the thing. Get this procedure wrong and I could end up lying on the floor with my smashed bones sticking out through my skin. So first of all, I need to let go of the frame on one side like this. It all feels very precarious with only one hand to hold me up, especially when you consider that the frame itself isn’t rock solid, isn’t attached to the floor, and can itself fall over, but that’s what I’m doing. And now, having managed that, I need somehow to reach across the chest so I can hook my fingers over the edge of it, and give myself a degree of resistance to any sudden movement backward. This is hard. This feels very unsteady and unsafe, but I manage it. The next stage is, with my other hand, to push the frame sideways out of my way, but not out of my reach, and without snagging it on the carpet or toppling over. When I’ve done that, I can tackle the drawer.

  Honk honk. Parp parp. The curtains waft about round the half-open window. Strange to think that there’s a street full of people down there who think nothing of walking about without any kind of support at all. But I must stay focused. There! Well done me! Skilfully manoeuvred! The frame is out of the way of the drawer but is still, at least in principle, within my reach. I put my hand on the drawer and cautiously test it. I do not want to end up on the floor with the whole thing on top of me. But it comes out more smoothly than I’d feared. Even better, my memory hasn’t let me down, and the things I want are actually there.

  I take them out, lay them on top of the chest, and push the drawer closed. Still holding on with one hand, I reach with the other for the frame. It’s hard to drag it sideways when its two little wheels are meant for going backwards and forwards. Ouch! Sweet Jesus, that hurt! But I’ve managed it and the frame is in front of me. I transfer my acquisitions to the canvas bag. I release my grip on the chest in readiness for putting this vehicle of mine through a difficult three-point turn.

  To six-year-old me this was a real adventure. Like proper adventures, it took time, and there were stages to it, and you had to pass through several different realms, each with its own distinct character. First you went through a small arched door and climbed a tight spiral staircase. You might think that this was going to take you all the way to the top, but no, it only took you to the huge, dim, empty loft that lies between the stone vaulting of the nave and its outer roof. This had a very distinctive, gloomy, woody smell, and you had to cross it, before climbing a dozen wooden stairs to a small door that opened on to a part of the rooftop, over which sheets of lead had been moulded, like pastry over a pie. You could see the old stone statues of saints around you, looking down into the Cathedral Square below, but you were too far from the edge of the roof to see what they could see. (One time, I remember, when we came here with some foreign friends of Dad’s, there were three little sky-monkeys up there, only a few yards away from us, gathered around a carton of potato chips.)

  There was a short walk then along a path of lead until you came to another little arched door that you had to open, beyond which was another stone staircase. At this point, for the first time, you were inside the tower itself, though I’m not sure I conceptualized it in that way when I was small. (In fact, I don’t think I had a mental map at all: it was all about sensory impressions back then.) The tower steps were daunting because they carried on relentlessly for the equivalent of three storeys and were very steep and not designed at all for the short legs of a child, and, though you could hold on to the rope in the middle, you sometimes had to relinquish it to people coming the other way (foreign tourists, typically, speaking some exotic northern tongue). To make it worse, those uncomfortably high and steep steps had been worn down by several centuries of feet into deep saddle shapes from which it would be very easy to slip backwards. Arrow slits let in a small amount of light and several times you reached what looked like it was going to be the top, but turned out just to be a kind of landing the width of a couple of steps, which gave access to the rooms inside the tower, in one of which, behind a kind of cage, and fixed to a kind of machinery made of wood, there were enormous bells – each one could easily have held four or five children my size. The worn stone, and the feeling of precariousness that came from the treacherous sloping steps, combined with my six-yearold sense of the dreadful antiquity of this building, created a very particular mood, oppressive and sinister, which added considerably to the glamour of the whole experience. As a child, when people spoke of the Holy Ghost, and how he was everywhere, I imagined being surrounded by this ancient, tomblike stone.

  When you finally reached the top, you stepped out through another little arched door, on to a narrow gallery that led right round the tower, and from which you could look down at the old city, and out over the sea, and across at the towers of the business district, and back at the new city climbing up the hill, all the way up to our house, which, when I was little, Dad would help me find through his big binoculars. This was the culmination of the whole trip, and the highlight of it was the sight of the tiny figures moving about in the square below, where we ourselves had been not long before, taking photos with tiny cameras, and feeding the miniature mynah birds and tiny sky-monkeys.

  I haven’t been up here for many years now and of course the climb no longer has the epic quest-like quality it once possessed. I can see that it’s not really particularly long or difficult or dangerous, and, after many plane journeys – they too were once also an exciting adventure – and many visits to mountains and skyscrapers, I find I’m no longer particularly enthralled by the experience of looking on the world from above, or struck by the illusion of smallness that comes with distance.

  Dru emerges after me. Amazingly, though he’s lived in the city all his life, he says he’s never been up here before. Amanda and Chris follow him through the little door. ‘Wow!’ says Amanda. ‘I’d forgotten what an incredible view it is!’ But, if I’m not mistaken, she’s having to force her enthusiasm, and would much rather not have been taken away from the memorial party in the chapter house, and the company of all those interesting people who she wouldn’t normally have a chance to meet, for that, after all, was what she and Chris came here for, and not to help an ex-partner re-enact a childhood treat that can’t, in any case, be replicated.

  The problem with the island, when I’m actually on it, is that it feels fake. What looked from a distance to be a charming little fishing village has long since ceased to be a village at all. I suppose a few people still live here, but the place is essentially a small theme park. The pretty white fishermen’s houses are all second homes or holiday lets, the church is a shop selling souvenirs, and the choice of eating places consists, at the lower end of the
price range, of a kind of industrial unit, inside the shell of an old building, which is designed to deliver microwaved versions of local dishes to as many visitors as possible, and, at the upper end, of a couple of chic little ‘artisanal’ places, which try to persuade the better-off visitor that they’re not like that other place and that the food they serve is in some sense ‘authentic’ and ‘real’.

  ‘Artisanal’, it occurs to me, as I eat a light lunch in one of these restaurants, has come to mean ‘place where nice middle-class people perform formerly working-class jobs’. Even the waiters in a place like this are slightly arch, and have degrees in literature or the performing arts. And that thought suddenly makes me think of poor Guinevere, who saw through the world, and, unlike most of us, tried to act on what she’d seen. People say that, in prisons, everyone hates the paedophiles, even the rapists and the murderers, but Guinevere was like the one prisoner who realizes that, just because someone else’s crime is viler, it doesn’t mean your own crime is anything other than vile.

  I leave my food unfinished and wander along the waterfront. Out here, I can see, beyond the headlands that enclose the bay, more islands in both directions that can’t be seen from the mainland, each one as inviting as this one seemed when I looked out at it from the shore.

  I go to one of the telescopes, drop in a coin and, after a bit of searching, I find our hotel. Amanda is out on the balcony. Even through a telescope, she’s too far away for me to make out her face, but something about the long, loose curve of her body is unmistakable as she sits on one chair with her feet on the other, a coffee cup on a small table beside her, looking down at what I assume is the schoolwork of one of her pupils.

  For some reason I feel an ache of loss and longing, as if she wasn’t just on the other side of the water, but far off in a past I can no longer reach.

  After a short rest, I fumble in the bag attached to the frame. I take out a notebook, some reading glasses and a pen. I’ve made it to safety. I’m in my chair and here I can remain until my next carer arrives.

  There is a small crisis when I drop the pen, and a long and uncomfortable episode ensues as, by trial and error, I work out a way of leaning sideways and downwards to retrieve it. This manoeuvre sets off a long bout of coughing, after which I wipe the greenish blood-streaked phlegm on my sleeve and allow myself another rest with my eyes closed, the notebook on my lap and the pen grasped firmly in my hand. My pain would be beginning to nag at me by now in any case, but it has been greatly aggravated by all this moving about.

  Someone upstairs is playing a radio. I hear only the insistent thumping of the bass, but whoever lives up there likes the old stuff, and I recognize the song. Outside in the street, the cars, as ever, are snapping and grumbling at one another as they pass on either side of those big squat palm trees that resemble giant pineapples.

  When my body seems to have settled down somewhat, I open my eyes again and look down at the notebook. It dates back to my last attempt to get my famous novel off the ground, famous in the sense that . . .

  But I’ve made that weak joke too many times.

  There’s a date on the cover and below that several different titles, each one of them crossed out. With my clumsy fingers I make my way through a forest of scrawled black marks on white paper, like winter trees in snow. There are page after page of notes and plans and little diagrams, all inscribed there many years after I’d last actually published a book. Here, for instance, is a page I remember writing in the Botanic Gardens about ten years ago, sitting on a bench in front of that duck pond beside the fence. I’m looking down at the words that my past self wrote, in handwriting that’s already a little wobbly but is far more fluent than anything I can manage now, and I’m thinking how strange it is to know that what I’m looking at isn’t just a replica of the notebook I wrote in then, but is the exact same one I held in my hands ten years ago, marked with the exact same ink that flowed at the time from my pen. I had brought coffee in a flask, I remember, and I had just eaten some tuna and cucumber sandwiches. And I remember that I looked up at the building opposite, where I once lived at an even earlier time – long, long ago – in that apartment I shared with Jezebel and that fellow with the rather old-fashioned left-wing views, and that as I looked up it, I had the exact same thought I’m having now about the way that physical things endure, and how they pass like time machines from one epoch to the next.

  This is not that much of a coincidence, actually, because it’s a thought I often used to have. It doesn’t strike me so frequently now, because I seldom encounter things from the past and am therefore not often confronted with the strangeness of material objects still being here when they come from a far-off there.

  I leaf through more pages. A lot of the ideas are pretty half-baked, to be honest, and hovering over them all the time is the knowledge that, even back then, I’d left it far too late. I must have known perfectly well, really, as I sat there on that bench, that the project for which I was making notes would never actually be realized. Apart from anything else, my last book had done so badly that no one was likely to want to publish another.

  Halfway through the notebook, the words and scribbles stop and I reach the empty pages I’ve been looking for. It’s not that I abandoned my project at that point, for there were other notebooks after this. It’s just that from time to time, I would toss aside one notebook and start a new one, because there was something hopeful about a pristine cover in a different colour and clean and empty pages that made me feel that, perhaps this time, I really would come up with a viable plan.

  I fold the notebook back so that it will lie open for me on my lap. I apply the ballpoint to the page. Straight away it skitters about, making a scratchy pattern on the paper, as if this was a séance and some impish spirit was trying to take control. Holding it firmly against the page, I draw the pen upwards. A very wobbly line appears, which I force with difficulty into a shape that just about functions as a letter of the alphabet. I’m going to have to print this in capitals, I can see, if there’s to be any chance of anyone being able to read it.

  I transfer the pen to a spot to the right of the circle, and lower it to the page again, where it makes another small skittery pattern. Making a concerted effort to resist the imp, I commence work on another letter, lift the pen again, transfer it to the right. Soon I’ve written a whole word.

  I take a pause to celebrate. The cars grumble outside the window. I embark on a second word and then a third.

  OUR LOST ATLANTIS. That’s what I’ve written.

  I lift the pen, and move it over the page with the slow, slightly jerky deliberation of a construction crane over a building site. Then I lower the pen and begin a new line with another flourish of random wiggles. It’s not going to be tidy, that’s for sure, but it’s pleasant to know all the same that, even now, I can still send something out into the world.

  We ride down together in the aluminium cube of the lift. He looks very smart in his work suit and his neat brown coat. I ask him about the meeting he’s going to. He explains it’s to discuss progress with a firm of specialist diving contractors, which has the job of checking the steel hawsers that anchor the turbines to the seabed. I didn’t know they floated, I tell him. I thought they stood on the bottom.

  He laughs. ‘I thought you looked a bit glazed over during that part of the conversation.’

  The laugh is strained. I’ve hurt him, I can see, but not really because of my failure to grasp the finer points of windfarm construction. What did it was the cold flash of contempt that I subjected him to when he came in with my breakfast on a tray. I know what that feels like. It’s like an icy wind blasting through your soul. You have to be an exceptionally confident person not to be shaken by the contempt of others.

  ‘I didn’t glaze over, I promise, but you went into such detail that sometimes I was still busy trying to picture one thing when you moved on to the next.’

  I meant that to sound friendly, but it came across as defensive and fo
rced. The lift stops at the third floor, and a burly man in overalls steps in, an electrician perhaps, here on a contract like Ham’s divers, carrying a tin box of tools.

  ‘Ground floor,’ says the lift, and we follow the burly man out into the clean, anonymous lobby. There’s one of those bland civic murals on one wall, made of beige-coloured tiles, that depicts a scene in the lives of the tribespeople who were the original inhabitants of this part of the southern coast. I stop to look at the caption beneath it, which explains that the name of this building meant ‘Hope’ in those people’s now-extinct language, but also meant ‘East’ and ‘Sunrise’. You never see them in the streets, of course – there are only a few of them left – but the sign explains that the name of the town itself also comes from their language. Apparently it means ‘Place of Many Octopuses’.

  Ham has stopped with me, because we haven’t yet said goodbye, and I realize that I’m deliberately delaying that moment, which is odd, because up in his flat a few minutes ago, I couldn’t wait to get away.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘We drive out all the people who live in a place, yet we still like to keep the name they gave it. It seems we always want to keep something from the past, even if we ourselves have destroyed it. It’s like a hand to hold on to, I suppose, when you’re reaching forward into the dark.’

  Ham smiles. ‘I know I’m just a thick engineer,’ he says, ‘but I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

  We head towards the sliding glass doors through which the burly electrician has already passed and emerge into watery sunlight and icy air. At the top of the eight steps that lead down to the street, I grab Ham’s hand to make him stop.

  ‘You’re not thick at all, Ham, and I like you very much.’