Blue Shifting (19 page)

Lucy moved around the bench and sat down, hugging her shins to her chest. The sudden sight of her, the visual miracle of her physical reality, filled Miller with a sensation akin to joy.

He tried to keep his voice calm. "And what made you think that?"

"I've been watching you, Miller. This morning, I noticed – you've gone the same way as me. They can't see you any more." She stared at him. "We're really the same now, aren't we?"

A silence stretched between them. At last Miller said: "Why do you think..." Something caught in his throat. "Why do you think this happened to you, Lucy?"

She blinked, threw the question back at him. "Why do you think it happened to
you
?"

He smiled. "Shall I tell you?" he asked. "It's only a theory, and it might not be right, but..." He hesitated. By telling her, he would be opening himself up for minute inspection, laying bare that part of him which he had kept protected with introversion and apathy.

"I'm a coward, Lucy," Miller said. "For so long I've been unable to take, because I've been unwilling to give. I could never bring myself to feel affection for another human being..." He paused, staring into space. "Someone once said of me that I didn't need people, and, do you know, that didn't really hurt me at the time. I was too self-centred and shallow to realise what an indictment that verdict really was." And he told her of his relationship with Laura, and the woman before that, and how he had hurt these people without really realising that he was doing so, how he had hurt these people, because he had not known how to love them.

The sun set in laminated strata of orange and blood red, like a banner declaring the birth of a new day, not the beginning of night.

"And you?" he asked at last.

She smiled sadly, forked away stray hair with the tines of her fingers. "After what my step-father did, I told myself that never, never ever again... So I ran away and didn't let myself be used. I didn't get close to anybody, you know? I'm twenty-one, Miller, and you know what – I've never had anyone." She stopped suddenly, shaking her head at her inability to fully articulate the degree of her pain.

Miller reached out to take her hand, and the warmth of it, the sudden electric vitality of her flesh, was like an affirmation.

They left the heath, keeping off the paths and scanning the grass for signs of trampling. They walked home along the road, stepping into the gutter to allow past the occasional driverless car, and the fact that they made it home without collision seemed to Miller a signal, an indication – despite the fear in his heart and the terrible sense of inadequacy at the core of his being – that what he was doing was right.

~

That night they lay side by side on the bed, holding each other and talking in whispers, as if the secrets they shared might be overheard and used against them. They talked of their pasts, of their hurts and disappointments, their failings and their guilt. They fell asleep, holding each other, as dawn lightened the sky outside.

For two days they remained in the house and talked and laughed and ate. Miller discovered a great affection deep within him, a desire to cherish and protect, and in turn be cherished and protected. On the second night their conversation halted, and they stared at each other, communication between them silent now but no less eloquent.

They moved to the bedroom and undressed and made love with the uncoordinated passion of the novices they were. In the early hours Lucy slept, her arms tight around Miller as if fearing that he might abscond.

Miller could not sleep. He extricated himself from her embrace and made his way to the study. He opened his journal and wrote of the events of past two days, taking care to describe exactly his thoughts and feelings.

Lucy was still asleep when he returned to the bedroom, her small shape curled beneath the sheets, childlike in her vulnerability. Miller lay down, amazed at the sound of her breathing, the potentiality of her being. He closed his eyes and soon slept.

~

He was awoken by something in the morning... or rather not so much by
something
, but by a subtle sense of
absence
. He blinked himself awake, recalling the events of the night before, and instinctively reached out for Lucy. As he did so, he had a terrible premonition – and his hand encountered a forbidding tundra of cool linen.

She was gone.

He dressed and hurried downstairs. The front and back doors were both locked from the inside. The windows were shut. He searched the house, but there was no sign of Lucy.

He returned to the bedroom, as if by magic he might find her restored to the bed. The sight of it, empty, reminded him of the joy they had shared – and filled him with despair.

He left the house and ran down the centre of the road, dodging the traffic. He scanned the streets, the gardens, for any sign of her. He ran on to the heath, taking pains to look out for trodden grass that would denote other people abroad at this early hour.

He sat on the bench on the hill, scanning the heath, the horizon. He remained there for a long time – certainly hours – as the sun rose over London. He thought back over his brief liaison with Lucy, and it came to him that the degree of feeling aroused in him was out of all proportion to the length of time he had known the girl. It was as if fate had played a cruel joke on him, to pay him back for all the years he had voluntarily shunned his fellow humans.

He returned home. He told himself that she would be there when he got back, cooking breakfast and oblivious of his desperation. He almost ran up the garden path, unlocked the door with fumbling haste and barged into the kitchen. Lucy was not there. The house was empty, silent. He was, as he had been for so many years, alone.

He passed the day in a daze. He sat in a chair by the window, hugging himself and staring blindly over the heath. As six o'clock approached, he told himself that he should be out there, actively looking for Lucy, rather than incarcerating himself in the house and bemoaning his fate.

For the second time that day he made his way to the heath and the bench on the hill. He sat and stared out at the deserted landscape, his heart heavy with a grief he had never before experienced, a despair at the wasted years of his life, the opportunities foregone, chances ignored.

~

Miller was not sure when exactly the transformation began.

So immersed in his self-pity, his rewriting of the past, he paid little attention to the empty world around him.

Perhaps it was the sound of voices that alerted him, startled him from his reverie, or perhaps the shadows that fell across the bench beside him. He looked up, hardly daring to believe what he was seeing, as if this was yet another jest the world was playing.

He stared about him in wonder.

The heath was populated by a hundred strolling figures: couples walked hand in hand, families sat in circles and talked, groups of friends stood in quick and animated conversation. As Miller watched, he was struck by the fact that it was not so much their visual presence that was the miracle, but the fact of their interaction.

He imagined the teeming city beyond the horizon of the heath, the intricate ties of association, the web of affinity that humans wove which made existence worth the while.

He stared, hardly daring to hope that what he was beholding might endure.

A middle-aged woman smiled at him. She gazed at the setting sun, the long shadows brush-stroking the heath. "Isn't it wonderful?" she said, before walking on.

Miller smiled to himself. He felt the urge to run after the women, take her in a fierce embrace.

He would go to King's Cross, he decided, try to find Lucy among the many homeless who made the streets of the city their home. And if, as he suspected, Lucy was not there to be found, had never been there...?

Then Miller realised that for him the real test would begin.

Blue Shifting

1

As soon as Janner awoke he cursed himself for having fallen asleep. He lay on his back without moving, feeling at once relief that he was safe, and a kind of retrospective dread at the thought of what might have befallen him. He told himself that, in future, he'd stay awake until five to be on the safe side.

He kept his eyes closed and listened, as if visual denial might make his situation somehow less real. He could hear the distant hum of traffic, an almost subliminal drone interspersed with the sharp sounds of horns, near and far; the ululating cries of women, and what might have been street vendors, in a high, sing-song language.

The air around him was warm and humid; he was sweating profusely. At last he willed himself to open his eyes. He was on the floor of a long, darkened room. He could make out rows of three-tier bunk-beds, occupied by shadowy, covered figures. He climbed quietly to his feet, careful not to disturb the sleepers, and moved towards a high window, one of a dozen ranged the length of the wall.

The sun was rising over a shambles of roof-tops – a dilapidated skyline of two- and three-storey buildings. Across from where he stood, a cinema – judging by the posters of overweight film stars placarded across its facade – was washed in faded pink and white pastel shades, like every other building in the long, narrow street. Down below, hordes of foreshortened citizens teemed, their one-way flow snarled by the occasional obstruction of a rickshaw.

Janner turned from the window and leaned against the wall. For the past ten years he had lived a reclusive life, at first in a shack on the lonely western coast of New Zealand's south island, and then, when his funds ran low, as a country ranger and fire-watcher in the Mount Cook National Park. After so many years with minimal human contact, crowds filled him with dread.

As dawn strengthened behind him and filled the room with its rose-water light, Janner paid more attention to the occupants of the bunk-beds. They were lying absolutely still, laid out on their backs and covered from head to foot with white sheets. He counted a dozen such figures. There was not a sound to be heard in the room, not a drawn breath, snore or waking cough. At once, he became aware of the smell in the air, an indefinable sweetness that bordered on the putrid.

His rucksack was on the floor where he had awoken. He snatched it up and hurried down the aisle between the make-shift wooden bunks towards a door at the far end of the room. Before he reached it, the door creaked open and the perilously frail figure of a small, old man, wearing a soiled white vest and shorts, hobbled over the threshold. He pushed a brush across the floor, up the aisle towards Janner, who stood immobile, waiting to be seen and anticipating an outraged reprimand. The old Asian halted, reached for a pillar to his right and flicked a switch. Overhead, a line of six large fans swept into motion, stirring the turgid air. The old man bent and pushed his brush ever closer and, as he passed, Janner saw the glaucous membrane that covered his eyes like the skin on boiled milk. Hurriedly, but with care so as not to startle the janitor, he moved towards the door and slipped out. His last sight of the room in which he'd awoken was of the old man sculling his broom between the silent corpses like a holy man bestowing benediction.

He almost ran down the rickety flight of stairs, turning on three landings before coming to the ground floor and the open doorway. Beyond, a press of humanity surged. Janner shouldered his rucksack and tried to prepare himself for the ordeal ahead. He took a breath and plunged into the flow, and was immediately swept down the street by the bodies around him. The pedestrians poured down both road and pavement, forced on to the latter only when black and yellow taxi-cabs, horns blaring, nudged their way through the throng. He was shoved aside by the first of four jogging bearers carrying a stretcher above their heads, the swaddled corpse jouncing with the rhythm of their steps. As he watched, the bearers cut across the flow and slipped into the opening of an alleyway, and Janner, taking his chance, stepped into the vacuum left in their wake. He found himself in the narrow alley. The cries and calls, horns and engines, were modulated to a background hum, though the press of bodies around him was just as intense. The alley was paved with uneven stones, sloping between crazily leaning buildings of tiny red bricks. The pall-bearers put on a spurt and passed from sight. Men and women, children and scrawny dogs pushed past him. A khaki-coloured cow ambled by, its bulging gut forcing him against the brickwork. Janner passed open shop-fronts let into the walls, faces staring out above goods for sale: packets of biscuits and incense, cigarettes and chocolate. He studied the signs and advertisements: the script was joined by a lateral upper bar, with hooks and swirls descending from it.

As he made his way down the alley, adjusting his stride to the long, uneven steps, a tout materialised beside him and kept pace with a kind of desperate, urgent skip. "Hashish, sir? Smack? Good smack. You want guide?"

Janner felt himself colour, increased his pace.

It seemed that he was hounded for ten, fifteen minutes, his silence met with an obstinate litany of offers, before the man gave up and vanished as instantly as he'd appeared.

Three times beggars at ground level thrust stumps into his path – arms or legs, he could not tell: his fleeting glimpse of raw, ill-stitched flesh rendered all limbs alike – and each time Janner turned his head and hurried on. He was at that stage of desperation – the minor troubles he'd experienced since waking indicative of his greater plight – that he felt like stopping in his tracks and yelling out loud. Then, almost before he knew it, the alley debouched on to a broad, sweeping plinth of steps, and he was staring out across the calm, sacred breadth of the Ganges.

The sights and sounds that had harassed him in the alley now decreased to manageable degrees of each: it was as if the expanse of the river soaked up the sound, as if the eye was drawn to it at the expense of the activity on the terraced bank: the scurrying of children carrying racked glasses of tea, donkeys bearing back-breaking loads of timber, the funeral processions following bodies borne aloft on biers, bound in red, white or orange winding sheets and heaped with orange flowers.

Janner had eyes only for the wide, slow river, a cynosure of calm after so much chaos. Slowly, he took the steps down to the ghats and entered a hexagonal belvedere or tower. He sat on the stone seat which ran around the circumference of the interior, and stared through an arched recess at the water, tinted pink and silver in the morning sun.

He unhitched his rucksack, removed his jacket and stripped down to his t-shirt. It was cooler in the thick stone shade, and much of the sound outside was excluded. He worked to control his breathing, calm himself and gather his thoughts.

He recalled once watching a tv programme about the holy city of Varanasi. The Ganges, on the banks of which the city was built, was considered sacred by devotees of the three major faiths in India: Hinduism, Mohammedism and Buddhism. Millions of citizens every year made the pilgrimage to the Ganges, to be blessed by its beneficent waters, to die within the environs of the city and be cremated and have their ashes scattered on the river... Janner wondered if the fact that Varanasi was a holy city was significant to the situation in which he found himself.

From a pouch in his rucksack he withdrew a spiral-bound note-book and flipped it open. He contemplated what he had written on each of the three previous days. He'd scribbled his hasty impressions of each city, the incidents of each day – but what concerned him now was not so much the content of his diary but the cities themselves. Surabaya, Alexandria, La Paz, and now Varanasi; was there any connection, anything that might connect the cities, however slight or tenuous?

A shadow fell across his notes. He looked up, expecting the attentions of a tout. Instead, a woman – a Westerner in her late thirties – sat down on the stone bench opposite him and admired the view.

He felt suddenly uneasy in the presence of a
bona fide
tourist, as if she might have the ability to see through him and find him out. Self-consciously he returned to his notes. There was, he decided, no possible connection between any of the cities. With the exception of La Paz, none were capitals; he had been to none of them before, nor even thought of visiting them. The more he considered his situation, the more ludicrous it became.

He sensed that the woman was watching him. He looked up. She smiled. She wore open-toed sandals, blue lightweight slacks and a white blouse.

"It is so calm in here," she said, gesturing back towards the terraced incline, "after the city." He guessed from her stilted English and rather out-dated, shabby dress, that she was East European.

He nodded uncertainly and pretended to busy himself with his notes.

She persisted: "Have you been in Varanasi long?"

A quick glance was all he would give her, hoping she might get the message. "A few hours. I came on the overnight train from Delhi."

She nodded earnestly, returned her gaze to the view.

He realised that he had broken into a sweat that had nothing to do with the heat. This was the first time he'd conversed with anyone in a long, long time – other than asking directions or booking hotel rooms during the past three days; for the last year the only time he'd heard the sound of his own voice was when he phoned in his daily report to the answer-phone at head-office.

He wished she'd shut up and go away. The alternative was that he should leave, but the thought that she might decide to follow almost paralysed him.

"Are you from America?"

He closed his note-book. "New Zealand."

She opened her mouth in a silent, understanding, "Ah," and lapsed into silence.

He sensed that she was lonely and culture-shocked, and was seeking the affirmation of things familiar. He turned his back on her and stared through the arched opening. On a stone platform ten metres to his left, directly above the water so that it could be swept easily into the river, a funeral pyre was burning fiercely, the thick, acrid woodsmoke hanging low in the humid morning air. Dozens of pilgrims stood on the steps which descended into the water, patiently waiting their turn to submerge themselves and perform obeisance. Directly below him, Janner saw a young man with a red-swaddled bundle in his arms; clearly rigor mortis had passed, and the slumped form might have been that of an infant asleep, not dead. Beside the man – and this made the tableau all the more tragic – an old man carried a huge, square stone. Janner watched them climb into a boat and row out into the middle of the river.

"Are you religious?"

Janner looked up, surprised. He'd almost forgotten about the woman.

He shook his head. "No, not at all." She was watching him. He felt obliged to ask, "Are you?"

She pushed out her lips. "There are many mysterious things in the world," she said.

He might have laughed at this at one time. He moved his gaze away from her steady regard. He decided the time was right to make his departure, rather than get drawn into some half-baked religious debate. He stowed away his note-book, tucked his jacket into his rucksack and climbed to his feet, making his movements deliberate in lieu of a farewell.

He felt a surge of relief as he left the stone tower and climbed the steps towards the alley, a sense of having escaped an encounter he had neither the will nor the emotional resources to see through. For so long his life had been governed by the fear of the new; for so long he had feigned contentedness rather than face the fact of his inadequacies.

He retraced his steps up the alley. This time when he came to the busy street – hard to credit that this press of humanity comprised a cast completely different to that which had passed this way one hour before – he had a plan of action in mind and he was unfazed by the bustle and the noise. He flagged down a taxi, climbed into its capacious rear seat and asked to be taken to a good hotel.

He closed his eyes as the car start-stop-started through the busy thoroughfare. He needed a cool, quiet hotel room in which to unwind, bathe, eat a leisurely meal and try to come to terms with what was happening to him.

~

The Excelsior was a grand Victorian building in extensive grounds consisting of long lawns and sparkling fountains. The atmosphere of
fin-de-siècle
calm that pervaded the place was a million miles from the hurly-burly of the city outside. Janner overpaid the cab-driver in US dollars and climbed the steps to the cool, oak-panelled foyer. A young woman in a gold and black sari smiled at him from the reception desk.

Janner requested a single room and the woman consulted a ledger. "We have a room on the second floor with a western view at one thousand rupees a night."

"That'll be fine." He had no idea how much a thousand rupees was in dollars, but what he wanted right now was a room of his own at any price.

"Your passport, sir?"

"Ah... is that absolutely necessary?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Why do you need my passport?"

The woman frowned at him. "Government regulations, sir," she said.

Bemused, he pulled it from his jacket pocket. She copied his name and passport number into the ledger, then flipped through the pages. Her frown deepened. She looked up at Janner, then back to the passport. She closed it and passed it back without a word.

A bell-boy showed him to his room on the second-floor; Janner delighted him with a tip of a dollar, then closed the door and collapsed against it. The window was closed against the heat of the day, the curtains drawn. A fan turned on the ceiling. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.

For the next couple of hours he attempted to empty his head of all thought, in the manner he'd learned at a TM course in Auckland over a decade ago. Perhaps, with a clear mind, he might address his situation with greater insight, discern some pattern to the events of the past three days. But his head was a swirling chaos of thoughts which would not be stilled. He glanced at the wall-clock. It was mid-day. He realised, suddenly, that he'd had nothing to eat for twenty-four hours. A menu card on the dressing table promised Western cuisine. He phoned down for the set meal and two bottles of Kingfisher beer.