Empty Space (16 page)

There was a long silence. ‘Jesus,’ Gaines said.

She told him about the Toni Reno case, and how the
Nova
crew had lied to her; the things that occurred in the lanthanide badlands of Funene. Gaines looked around  and, as if
quietly appealing to some other people, said, ‘You are shitting me.’ At that point, the field collapsed in on itself, so that Skull Radio became a cheap tin souvenir again: about
which the assistant felt relieved. Moments later, in a billow of cold air, Gaines himself entered through  the wall of her  room.  He  was wearing Hampton  chinos,
 a classic Guernsey, and over them a high fill-pressure down jacket an oily yellow colour.

‘Christ Jesus,’ he accused the assistant, ‘is there more to you than meets the eye? Let me ask you: what are you up to here?’

The assistant said she wasn’t up to anything.

Gaines sighed. He opened a pipe to the Aleph project. ‘Get me someone in Containment.’  There was a pause, during  which he considered  the assistant as if deciding
not to purchase her. ‘Do you like cake?’ he asked her. ‘I feel like eating cake.’ Before she could think of an answer, the dial-up caught his attention again.

‘I know,’ he said. He listened intently  for thirty-five seconds before interrupting,  ‘Something’s got loose and you fuckers don’t even know what
it is!’ To someone else he said, ‘I think it might have been in touch with her.’ This brought a prolonged response that failed to calm his evident anxieties. The assistant went
to the window so she could watch people in the street below. ‘Don’t go away,’ Gaines warned her. GlobeTown’s small evening rain was already finished. All along the other
side of the street, dub joints and crêpe stalls were opening for early business. Later, the port environs would flush themselves into Saudade proper  and these streets would be empty.
Until then the girls and boys laughed and kissed in the smell of food and perfume. Neon glowed through the soft renewed air; while, up in the room, Gaines presented his back to the assistant. She
stared idly at the pictographs marching along her inside forearm. Sometimes they itched. Sometimes they felt like real things moving under her skin. ‘I don’t know,’ she heard
Gaines say. ‘No one knows anything at this time.’ He closed the pipe.

When he turned back to her the first thing he said was:

‘We should let you go after this, but we agreed we don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t make sense for us.’ He smiled. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘
Do
you
like cake? All afternoon,  I wanted to eat cake!’ He walked her to a well known patisserie stall, Ou Lu Lou’s, up on the hill by the New Men warrens off Retiro Street, where the
sidewalk was crammed with people eating ambient tart, listening to music and drinking small glasses of espresso or aniseed liqueur while the neon scripts and city lights shimmered across the warm
air – love messages from  the  distant  all-night  venues along Tupolev and Mirabeau.

‘Look at this! Eclair! Cream  horn!’ Gaines rubbed  his hands together. ‘You look like someone who can eat cake.’

‘I don’t like anything with cream in it,’ the assistant said.

She laughed. Since the  events on  Funene,  she had  felt even more like an impersonation  of herself – of any self. Gaines tried to make her dance. She
didn’t know how to dance. The crowd began to look uneasy, and some of them moved away. ‘Come on now!’ Gaines called after them. ‘It’s only fun.’ He asked the
remainder, didn’t they think  the assistant  was beautiful? ‘Look at her!’ he said. He drank five or six liqueurs, but didn’t eat any cake after all. Instead he
joked with everyone and made sure the assistant had the things she wanted. Later, back in her room, he sat on the bed with his knees apart and his hands loosely clasped between them, and said
without preamble:

‘The thing about  life is that  if you get it wrong you can’t go back.’

There were two kinds of people, he said: those who lived their lives in the prolonged moment of panic in which they first realised this – ‘They have no idea where the door is now,
let alone how to get it open if they could find it’ and who therefore spent their lives thrashing about in what he called ‘the disorder of hearing it click shut behind them’.
The other kind, after a single awful pang, ‘one fast look back’, decide to make the best of whatever happens next. ‘Those people go on,’ he finished: ‘They’re
still hoping for something good.’

The assistant did not how to reply. Nothing he said was in her area of expertise. None  of it applied to someone  like her.  She wasn’t sure anyway that he meant her to
believe him. In the end she said:

‘Surely we can be anything we want in this world.’

Gaines dismissed an idea so simple. ‘When I got in this game,’ he went on, ‘I had a little daughter.’ He said this as if he was just now discovering it; or as if he was
discovering it about someone else. ‘A little girl,’ he said, after a pause; and after another  one, ‘I was twenty years old.’ This in itself seemed to be the story:
at any rate, there was no more to tell. It was as if, ever since, he had looked at these facts obliquely – as if he couldn’t see them  but could, with care, make them out as a
fairly robust implication of some other data.

He shrugged. ‘Investigate those mystery deaths if you like,’ he suggested, ‘or this
Nova Swing
rocket: but it’s a team game now. For all of us. Agreed?’
She had no idea who he was talking about. But each liqueur,  she noticed,  had caused his smile to become a little less intense. ‘Always bring the results to me,’ he
recommended.  ‘And never, ever say that  word to anyone again.’ The assistant opened her mouth  to agree, but before she could speak he walked straight out
through  the window, vanishing the other side, and leaving her with the impression that the view from her room was painted on the glass. As if the world fabric was a style of art to which
only Gaines and people like him had the secret.

THIRTEEN

Eaten by Dogs

Anna Waterman’s bedroom had what she thought of as a suicide bathroom
en suite
– extensive mirrors above sink and bath, everything else black
faux-marble cladding. The walls matched the floor, and there was no natural light. Uplighters provided enough of an oily yellowish glow to pee by. But switch on the three hundred watts of
fluorescents hidden in the ceiling and you had better keep your eyes closed: otherwise you would see – turning  with you when you turned,  wincing and holding its palms up to the
cruel radiance – whatever pitiful thing you had become over the years. In a bathroom  that implacable, even the happiest woman would find it easy to let the Jack Daniel’s bottle
fall and smash. Display as many bowls of dried rose petals as you like in that kind of bathroom,  but after you’ve changed the peach-coloured  bath sheets and broken
 open a new cake of handcut  hemp-oil  soap, you’ll still find yourself arranging the water glass and Temazepam cartons by the sink, or sitting quietly on the too-low
lavatory pan, planning where to make the first cut – and cuts will always seem necessary, whatever the financial or emotional climate.

Some part of Anna sought comfort, or familiarity at least, in the suicide bathroom. That part of her welcomed it as a concept as much as a place, a key theory about the world she had held
since she was young, a psychic refuge at the very same time as a site of existential terror, something  that would always be there for her: but the part isn’t the whole, and by eight
o’ clock on the morning after her swim the rest of her had begun cheerfully demolishing it.

Marnie  found  her there just after lunch, crouched  under  the sink in a cleaning-woman overall, with her hair tied up in a batik scarf.

‘What do you think, then?’ Anna said.

She had emptied the bathroom  of everything that would move and  piled it into  the bedroom.  Patchy success with the marble cladding had encouraged her to lever off one of
the larger sections of mirror; this she had dropped from the bedroom window into a flowerbed where it lay, unbroken  except for a chip at one corner, amid the childlike planting of lobelia
and ox-eye daisy. The pipes and cavities exposed by these operations,  she had done in gold or silver, according to mood. ‘Later,’ she said, ‘I’ll paint fish on
them.  Starfish. Seashells. Bubbles. Those kinds  of things.’ The major surfaces had taken their first coat, dark blue emulsion with enough white in it to suggest a kind of
Spanish azure, applied fast with a tray and roller. As soon as it was dry she intended  to put on more white, in dry combed streaks to give the effect of foam. It covered the walls well
enough, but the mirrors would need more. ‘I’m planning to keep to these pastelly greens and blues,’ she told Marnie, ‘for everything but the detail.’ For the detail
she had laid aside three or four of the smallest brushes she could find, beautiful sablehair modelling points. ‘But also if I can get some light into them, I will.’

Marnie stood in the doorway of the suite, stiffly considering the heaps of bath towels and broken fittings; the carrier bags stuffed with  leaking Moulton-Brown  shower
 products;  the  torn  black rubbish sack half full of triangular  shards of marble, none larger than  three  inches on a side. On  the fitted taupe
 berber  by the bathroom  door, Anna had prised open every can of paint in the house, from little unused tins of fancy enamel to five litre drums of professional obliterating
emulsion. All of this Marnie observed in disbelief. She picked her way over to the open window and stared down at the mirror  in the flowerbed. After a moment she passed one hand over her
face and said:

‘Anna, for God’s sake what are you doing?’

‘I’m decorating,  dear. What  does it look like?’ Anna  pushed some hair back under the scarf. ‘You can help if you like.’

‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Marnie said tiredly.

Anna thought  that was such a good idea. ‘Perhaps you could help me get these bags of things down to the dustbins too,’ she suggested.

Marnie insisted they make lunch – cheese on toast and a salad – and afterwards have a stroll round the garden. They dead-headed some of the sadder-looking  roses. They
lifted the mirror  out of the flowerbed and  propped  it up by the garage, where Marnie thought  it looked  almost  deliberate,  like a mirror  designed
 to extend the space in a corner of some well known garden off towards Glyndebourne, the name of which she couldn’t remember. Down by the summerhouse  she said, ‘I notice
you’ve got rid of the poppies.’ Anna, who felt unable to admit to her daughter that the poppies had vanished overnight, leaving behind them a strip of earth so packed and dry that
nothing  could have grown there for years, agreed that she had dug them up. ‘But I don’t see where you’ve put them,’ Marnie said. ‘They’re not in the
compost.’

‘Oh, somewhere, darling. I expect I put them somewhere.’

Marnie hooked her arm through Anna’s. Each time they drew near the house, she steered them away again. ‘It’s such a nice day,’ she said, or, ‘Those paint fumes
can’t be good for you,’ or, ‘Oh, Mum, smell all this!’ – indicating, with a delighted sweep of her arm  and  a clear subtext, the roses, the orchard,
 the August air itself.

It
was
a wonderful day, Anna agreed cautiously, and she had loved lunch; but she must get back to work now.

‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ Marnie accused her.

‘These days, I don’t know why I’m doing anything,’ Anna said, trying to make Marnie laugh. ‘Oh darling, can’t you give me a bit of room?’

‘If you don’t go too far.’

It was Anna’s turn to be angry.

‘How far is that?’ she demanded. ‘This place was always really rather ordinary, Marnie. That was fine for your father. It was fine for you growing up. But now I want
something different.’ Staring across at the summerhouse, she caught a fleeting glimpse of herself thirty years ago in a West London bathroom,  two o’clock in the morning. Fishes
painted on the wall, amber-coloured  soap with a rosebud trapped  inside like someone else’s past – the past you’ll have, once you’re in the future.
It’s the Millennium, or close to it. A dozen scented candles flicker, stuck to the bath surround  with their  own fat, throwing  on the rag-rolled  walls the shadows
of twigs in vases encrusted with fake verdigris. The bathwater cooling around  your nipples but still acceptable as long as you don’t move too often. 2am, and Michael Kearney’s
footsteps are heard upon the stair; his key is heard in Anna’s lock.

‘Come with me, Marnie,’ Anna said. She led Marnie upstairs and made her look at the new bathroom. ‘I want this. I once had this, and I want it again.’

‘Mum, I—’

‘I was younger than you are now when I last had a bathroom I liked. You have a nice stable life, Marnie, but I didn’t. I’m not giving my house to you. I’m not just
going to give you my fucking house and live in a shed somewhere.’

There was a long, helpless silence. ‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘what are you talking about?’

Anna wasn’t sure. Every attempt  to articulate  it left her feeling failed. She was getting the house ready for Michael: as much as common  sense, a kind
of shyness prevented her from admitting that. Over the next few days she painted.  It was hard  work. In the  end  the  walls took  three  coats and  the
 mirrors  four.  One afternoon,  she left the paint  to dry and  walked along the lanes to a pub called the de Spencer Arms, expecting to be able to sit outside at
her favourite table and – a bit windswept and pleasantly sundazzled – watch the retirees from London manoeuvring  their Jaguars in and out of the car park. Instead  she
found  the table occupied by a boy and two dogs. The boy had a woollen workshirt on over a loose pullover, and over them a donkey jacket. His jeans were tight, worn a little too long,
trodden down by the heels of his black, awkward, lace-up boots. Every item was covered in mud or splattered with paint. He was sitting negligently on the table itself, next to an empty pint
glass, kicking his legs and whistling.