Empty Space (8 page)

The assistant smiled and nodded. It was forty degrees in the control room; humid. She said:

‘I’m interested in your relationship of commerce with Toni Reno.’

Liv Hula claimed she did not deal with that side of things. She added, in an aside, that Toni Reno was a well-known cunt, and a bad dresser besides. ‘You would have to ask Fat
Antoyne about him. If you didn’t see Antoyne on your way up here, he is probably having sex with Irene in their cabin. It’s their habit this time of day.’

‘Captain, I’m interested to know if you loaded anything of Toni’s recently.’ The ki-gas primers fired again. This time the fusion engine came to life, its deep
groans of self-pity resonating in the vessel’s gamma-ablated hull. Liv Hula laughed. ‘I’m not the captain!’ She cut the engine and when it was quiet again, added:
‘My father gave me the soundest advice, “Neither a follower nor a leader be.” For the
Nova Swing
we decided not to have a captain that way. It was a decision we all
made.’

‘This is the paper on Toni Reno’s cargo. Maybe you recognise it.’

‘Could you find something to cover me?’ Liv Hula asked again.

The assistant went to the control room door, looked up and down the passageway outside, as if she might find what was needed out there. When you touched things in a rocket like this, your
fingers came away slick with the generic talc of other worlds. ‘I see the three of you in the Straint Street bars,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘You get on so well together.
Two or three nights a week you’ll find me down there. Since Aschemann vanished, those bars are my responsibility.’ She had depended on Aschemann. His ghost, which lived among the
shadow operators clustered in the ceiling corners of her office, was less use. Most of the time it was just a face. It often seemed to be warning her against something. ‘He taught me to
look inward, at places like the Tango du Chat; then, in places like this, outward at the stars. I can never make my mind up what it is I see.’ In the end she found a pink cellular blanket
at the foot of the command couch. It smelled as if someone had wrapped an animal in it. ‘Be sure and ask Fat Antoyne to dial me up over this Toni Reno problem. I’m always available,
always interested in the things you do.’

She drew the blanket tenderly up over Liv Hula’s body. ‘Warmer now?’ she said; and, pausing at the door before she left, ‘A space captain like you can afford nicer
pants than those, honey.’

The assistant thought of herself as someone unafraid to meet her own eyes. She looked into them every day but did not necessarily see anything there. She had her predictable circuit, at work
or leisure. Mid-day, she could be found walking between the booths at Preter Coeur, where she knew by heart the fighters, the cutters, the chops; they were like an old-time collection of
‘stamps’ or ‘cigarette cards’ to her. Early mornings she parked her big pink repro car on the Saudade Lots, where the event site bled into its own aureole and something
large but not quite visible could often be sensed repositioning itself in the rags of mist. In the evening it was the bars on Straint or the tank farm on C-Street – or she sat in her
GlobeTown room, looking in the mirror, watching rocket-port physics crawl over the walls and trying out names for herself.

She tried ‘Sekhet’, she tried ‘Sweet Thing’. She tried ‘Roses’, ‘Radtke’, ‘Emily-Misere’. She tried ‘Girl
Heartbreak!’ and ‘Imogen’.

She tried ‘L1 Dominette’.

She looked in the mirror and said: ‘She is too pretty not to get married.’

SEVEN

England Calling

In London, the weather had turned. Anna Waterman changed trains at Clapham Junction, and, taking the twelve-ten to Epsom, alighted at Carshalton Beeches. From there she
walked east then south under a sky that looked like both sunshine and rain, through long suburban perspectives off which the dense ranks of detached and semi-detached suburban homes –
each with its hundred-metre garden and mossy old wooden garage – stretched towards Banstead. Not far from HM Prison Downview she wandered into a street she thought she might remember,
entering the garden of the first house she came to. It was three storeys, detached, with gable-front dormers, walls done out in whited pebbledash, and clean bay windows on the ground floor.
Clean windows were a counter-indication: the house she was looking for, Anna felt certain, would have dirty, unused-looking windows, as if the person who lived there did not place a great
premium on seeing out. It would be a house turned in on itself.

Neverthless she took the pocket drive from her bag just in case, and held it in one hand. If she was stopped, she planned to offer it as proof of her good intentions. She could say, ‘I
came to return this,’ and it would be the truth. She was used to trespassing in people’s gardens by now. She had never been caught anyway.

A short, weedy drive gave on to the garage, and a front garden where ilex and old roses greened in a fitful light. Standing up at the bay window, squinting between her cupped hands to
eliminate reflections, she found herself looking into a room full of partly-unpacked boxes and crusty dustcovers, as if someone had started to move in years ago and never finished. Items of
furniture, including mismatched dining chairs and a hospital bed, were shoved up against the walls, off which hung narrow triangular strips of wallpaper stiff with old paint. Unplugged electrical
leads curled and trailed about the floor. The upper surfaces of everything, from the treads of the stepladders to the shoulders of the unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling rose, were
laminated with the gritty dust that collects in unused London houses, baking on year by year like a specialised industrial coating. The effect was of a room abandoned but not yet used. At the
rear, a door lay open – wide enough to admit some light, not wide enough to see if a similar dereliction prevailed the other side of it.

Anna was shrugging and moving away when she heard footsteps on concrete, and a boy of about sixteen came round the corner of the house, glancing back over his shoulder as if he had been up to
something inside. He was dressed in tight jeans rolled at the ankle, a T-shirt too small for him, lace-up boots covered in drips of black and pink enamel paint. Such disorder had been
gelled into his short yellow hair that it resembled an old scrubbing brush. When he saw Anna, he jumped in surprise and said hastily:

‘I don’t know what you think, but I’ve come to read to a woman who lives here. Sometimes I bring her a film, but mostly I read.’

Anna, not knowing how to answer this, said nothing. The boy stared expectantly. He was shorter than Anna, and his face had a raw appearance, as if he lived in a blustery wind no one else could
feel. Perhaps in an attempt to convince her, he held up a paperback book, thick, warped, browned at the edges of the pages. ‘She’s an old woman,’ he said. ‘She’s
lived here years. Some people like her, some don’t. She does her shopping down in Carshalton. She enjoys a film but it’s always something old-fashioned, that old-fashioned
kind of film she likes.’ He shrugged. ‘You want something more modern than that, don’t you. My eyes get tired though, with all this reading. It’s the dust. It makes your
face feel tight.’

‘I came to return something,’ Anna offered.

The boy didn’t seem to hear. He wiped his left forearm across his face and said, ‘I could read to you, too, if you like. That’s an idea! I could come to your house and read
this book.’ He held the book up again, and Anna, filled with fear and disgust, saw that it was a very old copy of
Lost Horizon
. Its pages were bunched and rippled where it had been
dropped long ago into someone’s bathwater; the back cover was missing. It might easily have come from the room she had been looking into.

‘I don’t think I want that,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

‘I never use the toilet here,’ the boy called after her, ‘even if I need to go. She’s too dirty, the old woman.’ Anna lurched into a flowerbed, then away across
the lawn. He thumped along behind her, without, she thought, making any real effort to catch up; then, as soon as they reached the road, jogged away towards the Royal Marsden hospital.
‘It’s a good book,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve read it more than once.’

She hurried in the opposite direction until, out of breath, she reached Carshalton Ponds. The ponds lay under a leaden sky, two strange, shallow, purposeless, industrial-looking sheets of
water separated from the road only by a railing, home to fractious ducks and gulls. Anna walked around them twice. I’m calming down now, she thought, surprised by her own resilience. He was
only a boy. He was as guilty as me. To demonstrate calm to herself – to act it out – she bought a tuna wrap and an apple from the supermarket on the High Street. These she ate sitting
on a bench by the water, while the young mothers more or less patiently urged their toddlers to and fro in front of her to feed the ducks. Sunshine came and went, but then it began to rain. To
Anna, something smelled stale, perhaps the water itself, which had a light, cobwebby film, a skin of dust supported by surface tension; perhaps the birds pottering about in front of her. She
hoped it wasn’t the children.

Carshalton is served by two stations; to reduce her chances of meeting the boy again, she decided against Carshalton Beeches and made her way up North Street to the other one. It was closer
anyway.

Arriving home an hour or two later, she discovered Marnie in the garden, frowning puzzledly over the contents of the flower-border at the base of the summerhouse.

‘I don’t know where all these have come from. Did you plant them?’

Anna, who had anticipated having her house to herself and felt put out, first claimed to have no idea; then, feeling that she ought to show some kind of authority, though she hadn’t
gardened for years, amended: ‘They’re exotics, darling. I think they’re doing rather well. Don’t you?’

They were. Though none of them were tall, they occupied the little border with a kind of dense self-confidence. Slack, poppyish blooms predominated, but there was a form of lunaria too,
and something that promised to uncurl into an oversized altar lily. The poppies had a curious brown metallic colour to their petals, which drooped from pale green fleshy stems, curved towards the
top like the stems of anemones, as if they weren’t made to support weight. Between them, lower down, as thick as a lawn, you could see the pubic tangle of a single dark feathery growth
– similar to yarrow leaves but finer in construction – which seemed to repeat itself at every scale; you soon lost your place in it. There was no point in admitting that the border
had fostered no poppies before today. ‘They look as if they’re made of paper,’ Marnie said, separating the flowerheads with her fingers, bending the stems this way and that so
that she could peer down between them – as if she had been thinking of buying them but was changing her mind. ‘Do you think they smell of anything? They’re very artificial
colours.’ She stood back, stared up at the summerhouse, and seemed about to speak further.

‘Before you start,’ Anna warned her, ‘I’m not having it renovated, pulled down or redeveloped as a granny annexe.’

Marnie looked disappointed but gave the most uncombative of shrugs. They stood there a moment or two more, listening to the liquid early evening notes of a blackbird in the orchard; then made
the mutual if unspoken decision to go back into the house. On the way, Marnie said: ‘I thought we’d do omelettes.’

‘I hope you brought wine, Marnie, or you can bugger off.’

While her daughter cooked the omelettes Anna made salad.

‘That box of old things you found?’ Marnie said. ‘I put them back in the summerhouse. They were just some old pin-badges and things from college.’ She laughed.
‘God knows what I was like,’ she said. ‘Early 1980s social science postgrad, fifty years too late. You’d have thought the world would change more in all that time.’
Her career in contemporary economic history prompted her to add, ‘But the money went, I suppose.’ There was, she believed, no money without change; no change without money. She poked
about in the back of the fridge where Anna stored, for periods of fourteen days to three weeks, very small portions of leftovers: half a boiled Maris Bard potato, two dessert spoons of frozen
peas dried up in a saucer. ‘What’s in this awful bit of paper?’

‘It’s cheese, darling. Please don’t make faces like that. I bought it because of the name. But then I forgot the name. It was something like “100 yards”,’
she decided. ‘It’s cheese. I bought it at the cheese shop in the village.’

After they had eaten, they finished the bottle of wine. Marnie switched on the TV and surfed desultorily, sampling a reality show in which people were invited to queue for items they
couldn’t afford to buy; then
Ice Melt!,
now in its fifteenth season; before fixing with an impatient sigh on the second half of a documentary which traced the slow demise of the
great Chinese manufacturing cities of the 2010s. Anna was reminded of the images of Detroit and Pripiat popular in the early days of the century, when decline and reversal – quick or slow,
economic or catastrophic – had seemed like temporary conditions, anomalous and even a little exciting. Long bars of light falling obliquely into the vast rubble-filled interiors of
factories already stripped of everything from doors to heating ducts; smoky pastel dawns in abandoned flagship housing projects where drug addicts queued patiently for an early fix; vegetation
pushing up through orbital roads closed to traffic less than ten years before; faded, uninterpretable graffiti: lulled by these dreamy images of dereliction, she felt herself falling asleep.