Empty Space (21 page)

‘So exciting!’ exclaimed Dr Alpert. As a child – eight years old and full of joy – she had loved those pictures so much that she remembered  even now the
lumbering  black cathode-ray  TV on which she had first seen them. They were less pictures than promises about the nature of the world, the rewards of study.

Anna – who, to the extent that she could remember the event at all, remembered it differently – could only shrug.

To the postmodern  cosmologists of Michael Kearney’s generation, entrapped by self-referential mathematical games, habitually mistaking speculation for science, the Tract had
presented as the first of a new class of conundrums:  the so-called Penfold Object, the singularity without  an event horizon. To Kearney himself it was just another artefact of the
24-hour news cycle, data massaged into fantasies for media consumption,  less science than the public relations  of science. The day NASA/ESA revealed its Tract composites –
great hanging towers like black smokers in an ocean trench,  luminous  rose-coloured  fans and pockets of gas, shock- fronts with an aluminium sheen, looping through the
gaseous medium as sounds 50 or 60 octaves below middle C, all layered-up from a year’s observations by half a dozen space-based instruments, not one of them  operating  in
the wavelengths of visible light – he had stiffened like a cat which thinks it sees something through a window; then relaxed equally suddenly and murmured, ‘Never fall for your own
publicity’; later adding with a grin, ‘They might as well have had it announced  by a man in a cloak and a top hat.’

A generation later in Dr Alpert’s office, Anna asked herself out loud, as if the two ideas were related, ‘What are dreams anyway?’

What indeed? thought the doctor, after Anna had gone. Sometimes the client beggared belief. Helen Alpert studied  her notes; laughed; switched the voice recorder  to Play, so
that  she could listen for a sentence or two which had intrigued her.

The client, meanwhile, her mood still elevated, loitered a moment or  two  on  the  consulting-room  steps,  watching  the  tide
 sidle upriver like a long brown dog; then, with the whole afternoon in front of her, made her way by two buses and a train to Carshalton. September, the greenhouse month,  wrapped
discoloured, vaporous distances around Streatham Vale and Norbury, where silvery showers of rain – falling without warning out of a cloudless blue-brown haze – evaporated from the
hot pavements as quickly as they fell. Nothing relieved the humidity. At the other end, Carshalton dreamed supine under its blanket of afternoon heat as Anna made her way cautiously back to the
house on The Oaks, approaching this time from the direction of Banstead, crossing the Common on  foot – past the  prison  compounds  which lay as innocuous as gated
housing in the woods – and entering the maze of long suburban streets at a point halfway between the hospital and the cemetery. 121, The Oaks remained empty, with no sign of the boy who had
disturbed her on her previous visit. When she tried the back door it proved to be unfastened as well as unlocked, opening to a push. Inside, economics – as invisible as a poltergeist, a
force without apparent  agency – was dividing the place up into single rooms. Evidence of its recent activity was easy to come by: stairs and hallways smelling of water-based
emulsion  and new wood. Bare floors scabbed with spilt filler, power cables lying patiently in the broad fans of dust they had scraped across the parquet, ladders and paint cans that had
changed places.

Anna wandered around picking things up and putting them down again, until she came to rest in what had been a large back bedroom, split by means of a plaster partition carefully jigsawed at
one end to follow the inner contour of the bay window. In this way, the invisible hand generously accorded its potential tenants half the view of the garden – flowerbeds overgrown with
monbretia and ground-ivy, rotting old fruit nets on gooseberry bushes, a burnt lawn across which the damp, caramel-coloured pages of a paperback book had been strewn. Anna blinked in the incoming
light, touched the unpainted partition, drew her fingers along the windowsill. Sharp granular dust; builders’ dust. Nothing can hurt in these unfinished spaces. Life suspends itself. After
a minute or two, an animal – a dog, thin and whippy-looking, brindled grey, with patches of long wiry hair around its muzzle and lower legs – pushed its way through the hedge from the
next garden and went sniffing intently along the edge of the lawn, pausing to scrape at the earth suddenly with its front paws. Anna rapped her knuckles on the window. Something about the dog
confused her. Rain poured down suddenly through the sunshine, the discarded pages sagged visibly under the onslaught as if made of a paper so cheap it would melt on contact with water. Anna
rapped on the window again. At this the dog winced, stared back vaguely over its shoulder into the empty air. It shook itself vigorously – prismatic drops flew up – and ran off. The
rain thickened and then tapered away and passed.

Out on the lawn, humidity wrapped about her face like a wet bag, Anna collected up as much of the book as she could and leafed through it. It was the novel the boy had recommended to her,
Lost Horizon
, ripped apart, perhaps, because it had finally failed to deliver on its promises of the world hidden inside our own. None of the pages were consecutive. Anna could assemble
only the barest idea of the story. A crashed nuclear bomber pilot, perhaps American, finds himself in a secret country, only to have it – and his heart’s desire – snatched away
from him at the last; paradoxically, that very loss seems to endorse the reader’s hope that such a country might exist. The front cover had been torn down the middle in a kind of careful
rage. Anna read: ‘The classic tale of Shangri-La’. A telephone, its ringer set to simulate an old-fashioned electric bell, started up inside the house.

Aluminium foil – as brown and sticky-looking as if it had been used to cook a roast – clung in ragged strips to the inside of the nearest window. Peering anxiously between them,
Anna made out the dining room. No improvements were ongoing there; nor was there much furniture or ornament. Two upright chairs. A gateleg table fifty years old. Green linoleum caught the dim
light in ripples. On the table stood a pressed-tin box with a glass front, about eight inches by four, someone’s small prize brought back from Mexico during the cheap air-travel decades, in
which was displayed the following peculiar diorama: an object the size and shape of a child’s skull, nestled on a bed of red lace like offcuts from cheap lingerie and set against a black
background (scattered with sequins and meant, perhaps, to represent Night). Otherwise nothing, except the rolled-up carpet propped in the corner opposite the door. Though the telephone seemed
close, Anna couldn’t see it. It continued to ring for a minute or two. Then came a loud, amplified click succeeded by the impure electronic silence of the open connection, and a clear voice
that said:

‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’

At that the connection broke. A dark figure appeared in the internal doorway, and after two or three quietly bad-tempered attempts a wheelchair was pushed into the room. Its occupant had
deteriorated since Anna last saw him getting into a cab in front of Carshalton station. One corner of his mouth was drawn up rigidly; his bald head, exhibiting the deep uniform tan of ten days on
some abandoned Almerian beach, shone with ulcers. He entered sitting upright in the chair – ankles crossed and knees apart, one hand performing an unwittingly hieratic gesture at the level
of his chest – but fell forward almost immediately against its restraining harness of broad nylon webbing. His head dropped slackly to the right – this brought into sharp relief the
tendon at the side of his neck, and offered his left ear to the white cat on his shoulder, which, as if it had been waiting for just such an opportunity, adjusted its balance; purred; licked
inside the ear with precise delicate motions. All the time Anna had been in the house, he had been there too, slumped in some other empty room, his liver-coloured underlip drooping and one blue
eye open in the heat. The harness, with its central quick-release mechanism, looked too robust for any forces the movement of a wheelchair might produce; while the seat itself had bulky,
over-engineered qualities, like something in a now-obsolete experiment. She knew she should have recognised him all along. Perhaps she had. Had he recognised her? Impossible to tell. Underneath
her amnesia the memory itself lay swaddled. It was the unthought known, always tucked carefully away, a self-deception under a self-deception. How could he have grown so old? The telephone began
to ring again, the white cat jumped on to the table and walked about fiercely. There in the water light of the unreconstructed dining room, the Mexican box glimmered like tarnished silver: the
dark figure behind the wheelchair reached over to pick it up.

That was enough to send Anna out of the garden, stumbling down the side passage, hurrying away from 121, The Oaks to the relative sanity of the suburban afternoon, all the rest of which she
spent wandering confusedly about, up one long street and down the next, heat ringing around her from cracked paving, until she emerged blinking and puzzled, hard by Carshalton Ponds. The High
Street lay uneasily under the sun, full of excavations – shallow, affectless scoops, the product of underpowered machinery and half-hearted plans, fenced off behind a long maze of red and
white barriers, which, like the cars in the street, resembled plastic toys pumped up to appeal to some infantile aesthetic.

A room the colour of a headache, she thought. And why had the window once been covered with roasting foil?

Her journey home was slow. The train – as poorly maintained as any public machinery since the serial recessions of the 2010s – failed repeatedly, a minute here,
two minutes there; then twenty minutes at a station somewhere near Streatham, during which period, a boy and a girl of college age, who had been kissing energetically since they got on, played a
complicated little game at the open carriage door. He stood on the platform, while she leaned out towards him from the train. He kept saying: ‘Well, tara, I’ll see you back
there.’ She would wait for him to go, then – when he remained standing there on the platform five feet away grinning at her – laugh and say, ‘That’s what you think,
is it?’ Then they would both laugh, the boy would half turn away, and they would start again.

‘I’ll see you back there. We’ll decide where to put it then, it’ll be fun.’

‘It won’t go in the corner whatever you say.’

‘I’m off now, anyway.’

‘I bet you are.’

Suddenly the doors began to close. ‘Tara then,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll see you back there.’

‘Tara,’ the girl said, turning away. At the last minute she squeezed between the doors, struggled off the train and threw her arms round him. They took a few stumbling paces along
the platform towards the exit, laughing and bumping hips and wrestling at one another’s shoulders. The girl made a fist and scrubbed at the boy’s scalp with it. ‘Hey!’ he
said.

By the time Anna got back it was almost dark. Craneflies tumbled into the windows, stumbling and crawling stupidly about the glass, pinned there by the papery force of their own wings. The cat
was out. Anna filled his bowl with tuna surprise, and put two goat’s cheese and spinach tartlets in the oven for herself. Marnie rang while they were heating up. ‘What a day!’
she told Anna. ‘Work was just appalling.’ Morning traffic had made her an hour late, she said. ‘The whole of Clerkenwell was at a standstill.’

‘Darling,’ Anna said, ‘it’s been at a standstill for twenty years.’

Looking for something equivalent to offer, she told Marnie about the lovers on the train. ‘After they’d gone,’ she finished, ‘I turned to look at the other passengers,
and I was the only one smiling.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘I felt like a fool,’ Anna replied, without a moment’s thought.

‘Still,’ Marnie said: ‘Romantic.’ Then she said that she had a hospital appointment the next morning. ‘It’s just a scan,’ she said. ‘But I
wondered if you’d come with me.’

‘Of course I will!’ Anna said, astonished.

‘It’s nothing, I expect,’ Marnie said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

One in the morning: unable to sleep, Anna switched on the 24 hour news, hoping, though she would not have admitted it to herself, for some indication that Michael Kearney had come home.
Nothing overt, she thought; just something casual buried in the coverage of a scientific conference. A clue. All she received was a sense that there were no longer any real events in the world
– that, whatever the ‘news’, nothing was actually happening until the camera turned its eye on each short jerky scene. Palm trees – enacting ‘stirred by an evening
wind’ –would jump suddenly, almost guiltily, into life as the wire service prepared to objectify them. In the satellite lag before the stringer spoke, you heard a faint, repetitive
voice which sounded like gak gak gak. Later she stood in the new bathroom, whispering anxiously:

‘Are you there?’ and, ‘You do like it, don’t you? You did say you liked it!’ Her erratic five-year transit of the suburbs and dormitories of South London –
launched after the death of Tim Waterman, accelerating when Marnie left home – was over. The events of the afternoon had proved that. Nothing had been solved. She was still unable to
remember what happened all those years ago, the night Michael entrusted her with the pocket drive. She stood by the bedroom window, rooting through her handbag. Out in the garden, a faint mist
crept across the meadow from the river to melt among the orchard trees. Eventually she found the drive and held it like a titanium shell to her ear, as if it might have verbal instructions for
her. ‘Oh, Michael, I know you’re there. Can’t you just come back and help?’

No answer: except that in front of her the summerhouse burst grandly and silently into flames, as black against the sky as the woodcut illustration in a book of Tarot cards.

SEVENTEEN