Empty Space (30 page)

By three in the afternoon, thick moist air had piled itself into Carshalton High Street, the sharpness of the morning having long given way to a sourceless, muggy heat. Anna
Waterman wandered fretfully up and down, trying to put off the inevitable encounter.

She leafed through the second hand books in the Oxfam shop; stood for a moment next to the artificial cascade in Grove Park, where the falling water evaporated with a smell like stale bird
feathers. Eventually, on the pretext of getting lunch, she went into a pub near the ponds and ordered a pint of beer. The taste of it caused her to remember the boy on top of her, so hard and
nervous, his eyes inturned. Her afternoon with him came back less like a memory of events than a single seamless rush of sensation – a shiver everyone knows but no one knows the name of
– and she had to walk up and down looking at the posters on the wall by the bar to give herself something to do. Club Chat Noir. The Aviator Club. A traction engine rally in October; in
December, the Chinese Circus. After that, she gave up on herself and sat in a corner and let the afternoon fade into evening. People wandered in and out, saying things like, ‘I can’t
cope, I was expected not to live.’ She caught the word ‘patterning’ or perhaps ‘patenting’; then, decisively, ‘contracts’; or perhaps it was
‘contacts’. On the TV above the bar, a European football game began. Pulling Anna’s third pint of Young’s, the barman looked up emptily and then away.

Fake beams, artex ceilings and floral carpet each have a profound – if under-investigated – anxiolytic effect of their own: by seven o’ clock, she had managed to forget the
discomfort of her encounter with Dr Alpert and gather enough of herself together to face 121, The Oaks.

As she left the pub, the evening rush was under way. ‘He can’t have steak,’ someone called out, ‘it’ll give him piles!’

Laughter.

Away from the centre the streets were wrapped in foreign-seeming air – air that warmed and yellowed the night without transforming it. You expected to hear cicadas, catch sight of your
own shadow on a curved stucco wall behind which growths of palm or jacaranda further enclosed a shuttered domain. But all you found was the usual holly tree and dirty pebbledash, and in the mossy
driveway an unreliable British sports car from the 1970s or a short-wheelbase Land Rover bought for a gap-year tour: some late-adolescent project abandoned under its green tarpaulin fifteen years
before, as the globalised economies, running out of new services to sell one another, preoccupied themselves with their own decline.

Holding up the pocket drive like a permit, Anna made her way round to the rear of the house. She found the main window dimly lit, as if by a source somewhere else in the house. When she
pressed her face against the glass, everything was exactly as she had seen it last: rippled green lino; a roll of carpet propped up in the corner opposite the door; and on the table the little
pressed-tin Mexican box containing a downscaled human skull nestled in scarlet lace. An old sofa, loose-covered in what might have been chintz, now faced the table. On it sat two women, short,
heavily-built and dressed in black clothes, each with an identical Harrods shopping bag resting on her knees. Anna could hear their voices, but not what they were saying. After a few minutes a
thin indistinct figure appeared in the doorway, pushing a wheelchair. It was the boy who had offered her
Lost Horizon
.

Brian Tate looked worse than ever. His upper body, no longer able to support itself, sagged forward against the chair’s nylon restraints; his skull – bald, ulcered and
fragile-looking, as if the bone had thinned year-on-year since Michael Kearney abandoned him to his doomed interpretation of their data – had fallen so far to one side that it rested on his
own left shoulder. His mouth was permanently open. One eye was closed, the eyelid drawn down, the cheek beneath sagging; while the other, as blue as a bird’s egg, looked brightly at the
wall, the window, the Mexican box with its curious contents, whatever he happened to be facing. It was alive and focused, but it was only an eye: it wasn’t necessarily connected to
anything. In his lap lay a greasy brown paper bag. The boy parked the wheelchair next to the table, facing the sofa. He set the brake carefully, forced a white 1960s motorcycle helmet and
ski-goggles on to Tate’s head – a process which involved some physical effort – then sat down cross-legged on the floor.

‘There,’ he said, conversationally: ‘He’s here.’

The women received this in silence, as listless and bored as patients in a dentist’s waiting room. They had left very little space on the sofa, but its third occupant, a small
middle-aged man with bright red hair, had managed to squeeze in between them. He wriggled and smiled around, as if it had been a recent, good-natured public struggle. With his dirty fleece,
alcohol tan and hoarse, personalised way of breathing, he looked like someone whose lifestyle choices would soon move him outdoors and to the centre of London, where he would limp up and down
Shaftesbury Avenue calling, ‘I’m in bits, me!’ and showing the tourists the Krokodil sore on his neck. ‘Hey, look mate, I’m in bits!’

For two or three minutes these three stared at Brian Tate – they were less acknowledging his presence, Anna thought, than confirming his existence in some way – then, without
speaking, and with no sign that they were aware of each other, or had a shared purpose, they busied themselves with their clothes. The women folded back their skirts from their thighs and slid
forward so that they could open their legs; the man struggled to unzip the flies of his tight Levis. There was a rustle of cloth, a sigh or two. They all began masturbating. Two or three minutes
later, they were still at it, staring ahead with expressions of absolute vacancy on their faces. Anna thought she could smell them through the glass. It was a sharp, yeasty smell, not unpleasant
but not very attractive either. At the same time, Brian Tate’s liver-spotted hands began to fumble with the brown paper bag in his lap, from which they extracted a half-eaten double bacon
cheeseburger. This, Tate broke into pieces, carefully separating the bun from the meat, which he held up, nodding his head and smiling at a point in the air above the Mexican box.

‘It’s coming up,’ the boy said suddenly, in a strangled voice. Silence from the others – perhaps a barely perceptible speeding up of their efforts. ‘It’s
coming up!’

The women groaned from the couch. The red-haired man yelped and gasped. A telephone rang in the distance. The Mexican box, illuminated suddenly from within, emitted a cloud of fine white ash,
which poured up and out into the room. ‘My name,’ said a voice from the box. ‘My name is—’ Then: ‘Is anybody there?’ Brian Tate struggled to answer, but
nothing would come out of his mouth. He had plunged one hand into the cloud of ash, and seemed to be offering, for the approval of something Anna couldn’t see, the remains of the
cheeseburger. After a moment, the glass door of the box fell off its hinges and Tate’s white oriental cat burst out. Snatching the hamburger, it jumped on to his shoulder and began eating.
At this the women redoubled their efforts, moaning, straining, grinding busily at themselves, their activity driving the room towards a state in which it would be both dimensionless and yet full
of possibilities. Shimmers distorted the air around the sofa: jumping to his feet, the boy gave the wheelchair a violent shove in a direction without logic – it was parallel, Anna thought,
to an axis the room didn’t share – and suddenly it had spun away on a curious spiralling trajectory. Tate and his cat went with it, growing smaller and smaller as they accelerated,
until they vanished into an upper corner. The figures on the sofa fell silent. Their will dissipated, their clothing disarranged, their shoulders covered with ash like victims of bombardment,
they slumped in foetal postures. With a sharp report, the window cracked from side to side and fell into the flowerbed at Anna’s feet. The boy poked his head out and said, ‘Hey, you
should have come in!’ He was tucking his penis into his jeans like a roll of soft pale chamois. Anna shuddered unhappily. She hurried out on to the street and glared back at the roof of
121. What did she expect to see? She wasn’t sure. Brian Tate and his cat, perhaps, spinning upwards into a milky overcast through which could be made out every so often two or three
unidentifiable stars, the only evidence anyone has of the infinite space in which we believe we live.

She had remembered everything but it meant nothing.

‘I’ve had enough, Michael,’ she said, as if Kearney really had come back from the dead and was standing beside her, the way they had stood nearly thirty years ago outside the
same house, in the aftermath of events equally strange and destabilising: ‘I’m up to here with it all.’

She caught the nine twenty-seven into town from Carshalton Beeches. Local services were delayed by works. Freight rumbled through Clapham: cement in dry bulk, denser and more real than the
place itself or the people passing through with their soft furnishings taped in plastic bags or their cat in a basket. Anna looked around and wished she had never articulated her fantasy of
living there: under the mercury lamps it proved to be just another railway station. ‘I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she remembered saying to Helen Alpert, ‘if
only for the company.’ Just another poor joke at the therapist’s expense, one more bid for attention. A man in a yellow safety vest wandered around, stopping occasionally to peer into
the lighted window of the platform café as if the things inside – cups, cakes, cabinets, paper serviettes – weren’t perfectly ordinary, perfectly easy to see, perfectly
legible
as
things. Otherwise there was hardly anyone around.

Her connection was slow. Its wheels broadcast a mournful ringing noise to the woods and empty pasture. Home at last, thirty-five minutes after midnight, she listened to a message from Marnie,
‘Mum, please don’t just go off like that without telling me. Anyway, how did it go this morning?’ Anna sat on the loo with her knickers down; she took off her shoes and
scratched the sole of one foot. At school in the late 2000s, Marnie had been so dismayed by the mobile phone that, though it was already the great load-bearing pillar of juvenile culture, she had
refused to own one. What had gone wrong since then? ‘Anyway, I want to hear how it all went!’

Anna could not guess the meaning of the scenes she had witnessed in Carshalton; equally, there seemed to be no way of interpreting her own history. In the end, if you have a certain sort of
mind, you can’t even separate the mundane from the bizarre. That’s why you find yourself face down in the bathroom eighteen years old, studying the reflection of your own pores in the
shiny black floor tiles. And if afterwards you choose a dysfunctional person to be your rescuer, how is that your fault? Who could know? More importantly, the past can’t be mended –
only left behind. People, the dead included, always demand too much. She was sick of being on someone else’s errand. ‘I did my best,’ she thought, ‘and now I can’t
be bothered any more.’ After making such an indifferent job of it for so long, what she wanted to do was live. As a starter she opened the downstairs doors and windows, then a bottle of red
wine. She threw the pocket drive in the recycling bin.

If she called Marnie they would only shout at one another. Preferring to avoid that, she took the bottle to the sofa—

—then almost immediately dragged herself through layers of silent chaos to consciousness, to find James the cat staring into her face, purring coarsely with something
between pleasure and possessiveness. She was naked. At some point she had woken without remembering it, closed the house up, taken herself to bed. ‘Get off, James—’ rolling away
from him and off the queen size box-spring, desperate for something to drink— ‘We aren’t even the same species.’ Though she was not directly aware of it, her dream
continued.

She lay on her side on a black glass floor in her Versace gown and long black gloves, upper body raised on one elbow. She was not turning from a woman into an animal or from an animal into a
woman. If she was not in transit, neither was she in any sense ‘caught’ between those two states: she was busily occupying them both at once. Though to herself she did not seem
entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else: she felt smeary and blurred at significant sites of paradox or conflict, in the manner of a Francis Bacon. Waking up never interrupted this
hard, thankless work of superposition (‘Someone has to do it, darling,’ she imagined saying to Marnie) or much diminished her sense of it. It was all the worse for being unconscious,
implicit, ongoing. It was all the worse because it felt like a commentary on her life, welling up from some internal source she preferred not to acknowledge. Halfway out of the room, she went
back and hugged the cat. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said to him. ‘James, if you want my advice, never be a failed suicide. You won’t hear the
bloody last of it, even from yourself.’

James allowed her to carry him downstairs. He dashed into the night the moment she opened the kitchen door, only to return excitedly a few minutes later with a neon kidney in his mouth.
Perhaps two inches by one and a half, with plump, eye-catching curves, it had a saturated pale blue colour and a transparent rind that seemed both resistant and pliable. James crouched on the
worktop and sheared into it with his back teeth, breathing heavily through the same side of his mouth. ‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Anna said, turning away in case she saw it burst.
‘I’m closing the door.’ But a long soft flash of lightning caught her in the doorway, throwing her into silhouette and projecting her shadow against the opposite wall. There was
no thunder. A wave of moist heat rolled into the kitchen. It was transformational weather, weather suited to another country: a thick low cloudbase, smells of static water pocked with rain. The
cat looked up, then down again.

‘Hello?’ Anna whispered. ‘Hello?’ She peeped out into the garden. It stretched away, elongated, too narrow, rippling with heat. Quiet yet catastrophic changes of light
revealed, a long way off, the summerhouse.