By Light Alone (14 page)

‘Surely.’

‘Never going back to that beastly place.’

‘She said not to get our hopes up. But she knows what – she
knows
what’s she’s doing, I think.’

It was hard, though. For two days, the thought that this woman was ‘out there’, shaking things up and actually
looking
for Leah blimped up George’s spirits. He felt as if he had woken from a slumber, felt energy fizzing within him. By the third, his spirits had sunk again. And for a time it was worse than it had been before. He knew he was skirting around the truth of things – that his daughter was gone, and he would never see her again. But it was too terrible to confront that fact. So he busied himself, and ignored it, or tried to.

He moved up to level 7 of his assertiveness therapy. His therapist was a completely bald woman with a chessboard pattern inscribed on her scalp, and a cleverly parsimonious manner with her smile. She lost no opportunity in touching him – laying a dry palm on his shoulder, or even his neck; letting her fingers touch the back of his hand as it lay on the table. George wondered if she were playing some complex therapeutic game, encouraging him to make a pass at her so that she could demonstrate her healthily assertive mode of turning him down. And in turn he wasn’t sure if he were supposed assertively to own his randiness and make the pass, or whether he were supposed assertively to deny his urges. Still, he was pleased to make level 7. It felt like a real achievement.

Life had to go on, didn’t it?

Ezra picked up an infection from somewhere – from where precisely, George had no idea; because his preschool was all virtual, and Wharton rarely took him further afield than Central Park. It wasn’t a problem in itself, of course; except that the machine the doctor put in the lad’s bloodstream to tag the infection and boost his immune kickback produced a pseudoallergic reaction. This, the doctor told them, was similar to a
traditional
allergic reaction in every external respect, but followed some arcane internal pathological route that meant standard treatments were not appropriate. Poor little Ezra’s lips became swollen and hard as mug handles, and his eyes went so dark red it was hard to see where the ‘whites’ ended and the pupils began. He whimpered continually, and writhed pitiably, so that Marie couldn’t bear to be with him, and gave up her usual breakfast and evening sessions with him entirely. Indeed, Marie took this development extremely hard, retiring to her bed and watching whole series-runs of bright-coloured storybooks over and over. But, with the help of some expensive neutral machines, the original batch was purged, and older medical antivirals cleared away the infection, and within a week Ezra was back to his old self.

Dot submitted weekly reports on her progress. George read them without too much attention, for they were full of detail that added up to very little, and he found his attention wandering. Marie avoided them altogether.

They all took an Easter holiday in Tokyo, their first since Leah’s evanishment. They didn’t do very much more than stay in the Superhotel Suzuki: playing in the forty-storey flotation cube, citywatching from the rooftop observation platforms. Wharton brought Ezra everywhere George and Marie went, without exception. Some of Marie’s anxiety about Ezra seeped into George’s sleeping mind, such that he found himself waking at odd moments in the dead night. But generally they agreed it was a success. Life had to go on. Life went on, at any rate. Even Marie understood that, at some subterranean level of her grief.

Then it was spring in New York, and the trees were pushing cottony blossom out at the end of stiff tentacular branches. The chill faded from the outside air. Ergaste called through on the Lance to propose a spring party – which was, George presumed, an English tradition. ‘Em and I, but also Ysabelle and Peter. Let’s get together. You’ve been through
hell
,’ he said with enormous emphasis on this last word. ‘You and Marie both. We want to show you we’re
right there
with you – solidarity, yeah?’ Despite his new level 7 status, he couldn’t think of a way of saying no to this offer; of, that is, communicating his fear that Marie would detest such a get-together. But after he had agreed he equivocated with himself, maybe it would do her good to be confronted with it? Didn’t she need to take properly assertive ownership of her trauma? Not to carry on fleeing it. At any rate, it was agreed that the other four would fly to New York, and that the six of them would have a meal together.

To his surprise, Marie seemed pleased at the news; and took the opportunity to have a complete vanity workover. They met at Frye’s, and the meal went well. For one thing, although Marie insisted that Ezra (and Wharton) stay in the car parked directly outside the restaurant, she did not, as George had thought she might, repeatedly interrupt the eating in order to run out and check that things were OK. They ate granules of beef in tequila sauce, and carrot tips threaded on strings of noodle. Then they had thimbles of gin-broth, little saucers of flavoured salt, and finally tubes of choco-rich. George drank plain red wine, congratulating himself, inwardly, on his monkish restraint. The others drank sugar cocktails mixed so that the colours shifted according to ad-sense kaleidoscopic. Ergaste was on surprisingly diplomatic form. He hardly boomed, or bullied, at all. Instead, producing an unexpected tenderness out of his manner like a conjurer, he prompted Marie to general conversation, and from time to time squeezed her hand. Ysabelle, after some bland pleasantries with George, focused all her attention on Ergaste, breaking into a weird brakepad-friction laugh from time to time, in an exaggerated way. It was as if she had never had sexual intercourse with George. George, for his part, was happy to go along with that. Peter kept checking in on some sporting fixture or other on his Fwn, but seemed generally in good humour. Emma, it turned out, was also in assertiveness therapy.

‘I
knew
you were in the therapy!’ she told George, in her singsong voice. ‘I could sense it.’

‘Really?’ he said, rather pleased.

‘Oh yes. You have a
splendidly
assertive manner.’

‘I do.’

‘It
shines
from you.’

‘Do you really think so?’ he replied. He was milking it, he knew. But the cactus craves the tiniest moisture drops. It was hard to believe that Emma, this timid woman, was also undergoing the therapy. How did she possibly get by? The way she sucked the left portion of her lower lip into her mouth, or folded it outwards into a little crease between her fingers. The way her eyes would never settle, darting continually from sinister to dexter and back to sinister. She was the least healthily assertive individual he knew. But of course courtesy required he repay in kind. ‘And, ah! You too, of course,’ he said, in an unconvincing voice.

‘I’ve been going for years,’ she told the tabletop.

‘Really?’

‘It’s so obvious to me now that
true
mental health is a superstructure built upon the base of a properly assertive being-in-the-world,’ she said, lifting her mouse-grey eyes to look at George. She dropped them again.

‘Just so,’ said George. He wondered if it was polite to ask her what level she was at, aware that he’d be doing do only to brag about his own recent ascent. But just as he decided that he couldn’t raise the subject, she volunteered the information. ‘I’m level seven,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ he said, feeling a shock of disappointment.

‘Er thinks it’s a waste of time,’ she added, gesturing twitchily with her head. George heard this as ‘her thinks’, assumed it was a British idiom. ‘Who does?’ he asked, following the direction of her gesture. ‘Ysabelle?’

‘Ergaste,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘He says I’m no more assertive than a clod. But I explained to him –
you
understand this, I know – that it’s not about turning yourself into a bully, into a blustering oaf – like – like
some
people I could mention. It’s inner assertiveness. It’s spiritual, really.’ She put her attention into an intimate examination of the streaks of choco-rich still adhering to the side of her little half-sphere bowl.

For George, who assumed that assertiveness therapy did indeed translate into more forceful external behaviour, held his peace. ‘I’m sure,’ Emma said, after a while, ‘that it’s been a help.’

‘Help?’

‘Dealing with your horrid, your foul, your
tragic
, rather, thing. Your
tragedy
.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I guess. Sure.’

‘You’re certainly dealing with it really well!’

At this point the six of them went up to the building’s roof. Frye’s had installed diffraction projectors all round the rim, to block out the city lights and create a sort of funnel of darkness – the point, of course, was to make the stars visible mid-city. So they all stood for ten minutes with their heads cricked backwards like pez-dispensers, gazing upwards. ‘Never fails,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘Never fails to amaze!’

Ergaste, Peter, Ys and Marie wandered to the far corner. But Emma crept up close to George, she said: ‘Oh, look at the stars! Aren’t those stars simply
splendid
?’

‘There’s rather more of them,’ George said, ‘than is absolutely necessary, I’ve always thought.’

‘Oh, but the beauty is
in
the profusion!’

‘The untidiness certainly is.’

She laughed at this, a series of little, piping sounds. ‘You are funny.’

‘Hey! Really? Well
that’s
not something generally remarked upon.’

‘You are funny,’ she insisted. ‘You’re wry.’ Then, glancing nervously over her shoulder, she stretched up and kissed him. George could not have been more astonished had she punched him on the nose – kissed him on the front of his face, not quite connecting with his mouth, her upper lip pressing against his lower and the rest of her mouth squelching against his chin. At the same time she put her left hand on his right arm, her right hand on his left arm, and squeezed with an almost mannish grip, as if fearful he’d bolt and run away.

George disengaged as best he could. ‘Emma.’

She began gabbling a good deal of stuff in a low voice, several times looking over her shoulder at the others: ‘You’re so sensitive, your carriage and bearing is so
sensitive
. You have such a beautiful
face
. I’m crushed by Ergaste. He’s crushing me.
You
understand me –
you
have a beautiful soul’

‘Emma, look, really . . .’

‘I
love
you, I feel this tremendous
passion
for you, I confess it, how rare it is to feel a
connection
with a person in this hothouse of life. The
stars
have determined our meeting.’

It was all very tiresome indeed.

‘You’ve got the wrong link, Emma,’ he said. ‘I’m – no – I’m a no. I’m sorry.’

But she wasn’t to be deterred. She tried a different angle, hissing quickly in a hoarse voice: ‘I’m a woman living in a hellish prison. Er doesn’t care about me, he doesn’t love me, he never shows me any affection. He’s shown no more decent husbandly interest in me than if I were a piece of furniture.’

‘He has shown,’ George said, removing the grip she had reasserted on his right arm, and trying to keep his voice on the civilized side of anger, ‘enough interest in you to father your child.’

She flinched away at this, as if at a slap. And just in time, too; for the other four were strolling back, discussing which of the several rapidly sliding lights belonged to the Orbital, and which were L8 burners. Ergaste, blithely unaware of his wife’s mood, putting a tampon-shaped c:snuff dispenser into his left nostril. ‘Shall we go back down?’ he boomed. ‘A snifter before we call it a night?’

All down the sliding walkway Emma kept peering over at George. She looked distressed. Or perhaps she looked angry. Either way, George was relieved to get to the bar, I’ll not lie to you, and to top up his blood-alcohol level with some Red Whisky.

Marie conducted a long conversation on her Fwn with Wharton about Ezra, even though only five metres and one wall separated them. Peter and Ergaste had a bantering disagreement on the proper way to cook jellyfish. ‘Point the Fwn at him again,’ Marie was saying. ‘No – at his face. Is his mouth open? Is that an open mouth? Is his nose blocked?’

Then Emma, turned her back on all of them with an actor’s command of the space, and began sobbing loudly. Ergaste swept her up in his right arm and whisked her away. ‘
Splendid
to see you all,’ he said. ‘George, Marie, we’re
with
you. You’re doing
tremendously
well.’ He was at the door, and his car was drawing up outside, but he turned once more, cradling his sobbing wife into his armpit, and called back to them: ‘Look how
well
you’re doing!’

Later, in their own car, with Ezra snoring like a mosquito in his cot, and Wharton’s eyelids slipping down and perking open over and over, Marie said suddenly: ‘Did Emma make a play?’

‘Oh,’ he exclaimed, genuinely. ‘Horrid woman!’

‘I thought I saw her all over you. On the roof, wasn’t it?’

‘It came from
nowhere
,’ he complained.

‘I thought I saw her make a play,’ she said, in an unreadable tone of voice.

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