Nova Swing (16 page)

“It was a mistake I made,” she apologised to Aschemann. “I thought you said you would be there.” She glanced at the data flowing endlessly up and down her arm; for a moment, despite all her training, she couldn’t do anything with it. I was trying to understand you, she thought of explaining: but in the end only advised him, “You should get some sleep,” and cut the connection.

After Aschemann left, Edith Bonaventure went to her father’s room, stood looking down for a minute or two at the blue hollows behind his collarbones, then took him by the shoulders and shook him until he woke. “Listen to me, Emil,” she said. “Listen. Look at me and help.” He coughed suddenly. “I’m sorry to do this, Emil,” she said. She pulled him forward so that he lolled against her, weightless and rank, his chin on her shoulder taking the weight of his head like a baby’s, while she felt around, first under the pillows then under his hot skinny buttocks. “I need it and it has to be here somewhere.” Suddenly she shoved him away and began to beat his chest with her fists. “I’m serious,” she said, “I’m serious, Emil.” Emil made vague defensive motions.

“Hey,” he said thickly. “There’s no need for this.”

“Where is it?”

There was a longish pause and she thought he had passed out again. Then he laughed.

“It’s under the bed.”

“You bastard, Emil. You fuckhead.”

“It’s under the bed with the bottles. It was always there,” Emil said. “You could have looked any time.” His laughter grew quieter and stopped. “It won’t do Vic Serotonin any good,” he warned her. “There’s no good giving it to Vic.” Contempt came into his voice. “Why? Because he’s a tourist.” He leaned carefully over the side of the bed and vomited a thin line of bile on to the floor. “Sorry,” he said. He hung there exhausted, his face a foot from the boards, sentient tattoos crawling for cover like lice between the sores and shadows of his ribs. His skin was rich with a smell she couldn’t explain. Edith hauled him back into bed and mopped up. She wiped his face, which had once had the power to solve every problem for her, but which now seemed all bone and stubble, hurt eyes like a boy. It was a face which for sixty years admitted desire but not alleviation. He had always moved on to the next thing; he had never taken shelter, and as a result he didn’t know how. She clutched him and rocked him. “You were always useless,” she told him. “You were a useless father.” She began to cry. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“I’m sorry about your life,” Emil whispered.

She let him fall, and sat back in disgust. “Won’t you grow up even now?” she shouted.

The journal was there, pushed as far as he could reach into the darkness under the bed, where the only way to find it was to sweep your hands to and fro in blind disgust until one of them touched it. What else was underneath? Edith didn’t want to know. “Spew up on me while I’m down here,” she warned him, “I’ll kill you.” No answer. But as soon as she had the book and stood up to go, he grabbed her arm and drew her down towards him. She was astonished by his strength—understood, for the first time, that everybody in his life had been too.

“Where’s Vic?” he said.

“Vic’s not here, Emil.”

“I never went deeper,” he said. “This is the record of it. A year inside the site, and this book is everything I saved.”

“Emil—”

“Fifty of us set out, two came back. We travelled to the heart of it. Where’s Vic Serotonin been? Nowhere.”

“Emil, you’re hurting me.”

“It was worth it,” he said.

His eyes went out of focus very suddenly and he let go her arm. “A year passed in there, Billy boy,” he shouted, “less than a day out here. What do you make of that?”

After she had calmed him down she brought the journal to her own room. It looked worse in the light. Her father’s adventures had aged it the same way they aged him. Its covers were bruised and greasy; like Emil’s, its spine was rotten. Every page was stained, spattered, slashed; some had been torn in half longitudinally, to leave only curious groups of words—“emergent behaviour,” “sunset of the amygdila” and “outputs accepted as input.” But these were just problems of legibility. The site being as it was, an electromagnetic nightmare, writing was the only way to get anything out: but how do you write the fakebook to a place that is constantly at work to change the ink you write with, let alone the things you see? Her father’s script tottered into the gale of it, stumbling off the edge of one page to fall by pure luck on to the next.

He tried to remain calm. Of a misfired attempt to go in from the sea using inflatable boats, he recorded, “Two miles from [illegible] Point, wrecks show themselves at half tide.” Then, “Satnav and dead reckoning both unreliable here but keep Mutton Dagger in line with the derelict fuel refinery and you might clear the sand. Ben Moran says he went in hard and got two feet clearance at low water.” Scribbled across this, in a hand so distraught it looked like someone else’s, was the instruction, “Forget it.” Then underneath: “Something ate Billy in the fog. We lost the [illegible] & had to walk out. Four days in here, a week passed outside.”

And then: “How do we know that what we come back to is the same?”

Edith shut the book there and then. To read any more would be to read too far into Emil.
How do we know that what we come back to is the same?
Less a cry of horror than of triumph. In plain fact her father was only alive when he was in there, where everything was toxic, indefinable, up for grabs. Whatever he said about it—whatever he said about himself—it was the anxiety he loved. He loved the shadows, the wrenched way the light fell, the unpredictability of it all. So what he wrote in the journal was nothing like the assured face he showed the world, or even the one he showed himself, and that was why his handwriting had this disordered, scribbled, racing look about it. As for Vic Serotonin, he was the same. Despite Emil’s bad opinion, Vic was the same, so maybe the book would be a help to him. Maybe, after all, it would give him the edge in his situation with Lens Aschemann and Paulie DeRaad. Whatever that was.

“Vic, you moron,” Edith said gently, as if he was in the room with her.

When she looked up, the accordions glared at her from the walls; out the window she could see the street full of cats, their black and white fur untouched by the fierce gold needles of rain falling through the streetlight. Despite these omens Edith tucked the book away, put on her maroon wool street coat and found her umbrella. “I’m going out!” she called up to her father. For the longest time there was no answer; then just before she slammed the outside door, Emil, who had lain there alert and intelligent with a curious hard smile on his face since she took the journal, called down:

“It won’t do him any good. My advice, give it to Aschemann, at least he’s dependable.”

“Emil, you love Vic!”

This made her father laugh; the laugh turned quickly into a cough. “So what?” Emil Bonaventure asked the ceiling when he could speak again. You can love a disappointment.

Earlier that evening, Vic Serotonin had walked into Liv Hula’s place in time to hear Liv say to Mrs Kielar:

“Sometimes I could do without that.”

He had no idea what they were talking about. Reduced to essentials by the strong overhead light, leaning towards one another from each side of the zinc bar, the two women made between them a shaped gap, a Rubin’s vase illusion. Though none of their differences could be said to be resolved by this, it gave them something in common for once: more, at any rate, than Elizabeth Kielar’s cup of chocolate cooling on the counter by her hand; more than either of them might have in common with Vic Serotonin. Vic was surprised to catch that glimpse of them. They spoke for a moment longer, then, becoming aware of him, seemed to move languidly apart and break the spell.

“Hi, Vic,” Liv Hula said. “Get you something?” Then, as if he couldn’t already see, “Your client’s here.”

It had been a quiet night. Earlier, a few tailors from the franchise chopshops along Straint came in to celebrate a win at the fights; they had been followed back from Preter Coeur by some tourists off a Beths/Hirston ship—probably the
Pro Ana,
to which, outbound on her twice-yearly loop of creatively selected Beach destinations, Saudade was little more than a fuel stop. For twenty minutes this was the cause of unhealthy excitement among Liv’s shadow operators, but then one of the tourists remembered the name of a new venue off Antarctic Boulevard and they all left. That was the bar trade in a nutshell, Liv thought, as she tidied tables, added up the money in the till and washed the empty glasses, letting the warm water lave her hands. She had the blues for her old life, which was different than this. That afternoon, in her room upstairs, two things had happened.

First, she had encountered herself by accident in the mirror. The face she saw was too much her own, and too little like Elizabeth Kielar’s face. It was tired of never owning a fur coat. It was tired of always being what it was. Its eyes looking out were no longer calm. Up in the Halo you could beat that, you could always reinvent, move yourself on. Because empty space is kind. Everything’s negotiable out there. There’s so little to run into. But down here your room is what you are.

The second thing that happened to Liv was this: waking from a shallow sleep, she sat on the edge of the unmade bed and looked out the window and saw Antoyne Messner walking past with Irene the Mona on his arm. Irene had on a new outfit, cropped mohair bolero, latex pedal-pushers, acrylic stilt-heels, all in popular neoteny pink; while the fat man was wearing the pale blue suit she made him buy when he started working for Paulie DeRaad, with his hair arranged in a ridged oily wave on top of his head. They looked ridiculous, but at the same time mysteriously dignified just by being together. They looked like the king and queen of the affect. Seeing them in that unaccustomed light, she had wondered if she should run downstairs, ask them why they never drank at her bar any more. Now, as she watched Vic Serotonin usher his client to a table by the window where they sat down and began to talk earnestly, she found herself thinking the same thing she had thought about Antoyne and the Mona:

Those two believe they’ve discovered something new. Good luck to them, then.

In fact Vic Serotonin was saying, “Maybe in four days we can risk it,” and Mrs Kielar was already beginning to shake her head, no. It had to be sooner for her, she said, this was such bad news for her. Her nerves were worse. She wasn’t sure, she said, she could wait another day. “I’m not sure I can wait an hour.” And it was true, he thought. Whatever was consuming her from inside had upped its ante since she fucked Vic in the Hot Walls apartment.

“Three days, then,” he offered.

She shook her head. He took her hand, which she was already beginning to pull away as he reached for it, and explained, “It’s only because things are going on here I don’t understand.”

“No,” she said.

“Two days,” Vic said. “Two days, Mrs Kielar, you can allow me that. Something’s wrong with Paulie, something’s wrong in the site. The police are all over everything like a cheap suit.”

Mrs Kielar, trying to avoid this information the way you would avoid a physical blow, got to her feet so suddenly her chair toppled over. She stared down at it as if a chair being knocked over was already the worst thing that could happen to either of them.

“I can’t,” she whispered.

At that point Vic didn’t see a way forward. He was as puzzled by his own behaviour as by hers. “I’m waiting for something to happen,” he remembered her saying, “and I don’t even know what part of my life it will approach from.” He got up and put his arm round her and set the chair back on its feet. “Look,” he said, “there. You see? It’s OK. It’s no problem.” Where his hand touched it, he could feel the whole thin apparatus of her right shoulder rigid and trembling. He was aware of the hot bones,
Elizabeth Kielar
inscribed through every one of them. “We’ll be in there in forty-eight hours’ time,” he said. “I promise.” She was like a hologram; if you looked, every part of her would prove to contain the whole you didn’t understand. He tried to persuade her to sit down again. She clung to him instead. They ordered more drinks and sat on opposite sides of the table, not speaking but holding hands. Much later, when Edith Bonaventure walked into the bar dressed in her maroon wool coat and holding her father’s site-journal, that was how she found the two of them.

“Vic, you cheap shit,” Edith said.

She went over and asked Liv Hula to give her a drink. “I’ll take that here at the bar,” she told Liv. “You don’t mind if I sit on the stool and talk?”

“You’re the customer,” Liv Hula said.

“That’s good, that’s nice,” said Edith. “It’s nice because if I face you I don’t have to look at that shit by the window.” She assessed the bar a moment. “It’s a nice business you have here,” she advised Liv Hula, “but a little kicked about. It needs a refit. It needs a theme, something cheerful.” She put down half her drink in one swallow and wiped alcohol out of the faint down on her upper lip. “Hey, Vic,” she called, holding the journal up high in one hand so he couldn’t mistake what it was, “Emil was right about you. See this? I walked all the way across town to give it you, now you can whistle.”

“Jesus,” Vic said.

“You can fucking whistle for it, Vic, because you’re a cheap toilet and in the end where have you been? Nowhere.” Edith finished her drink and stood up. “Thanks for that,” she said to Liv Hula. “I enjoyed that. Goodnight.”

Vic Serotonin was on his feet by then. He got to the door first and caught her by the wrists.

“Edith, we can talk,” he said.

Edith laughed lightly. “No we can’t, Vic,” she said. “You made an error there.”

Vic tried to think what to say to her. “Listen,” he began, “whatever Emil says, something is changing in there.” He already saw that this wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but he couldn’t stop. “
All
our experiences of it might be false.”

“How nice it would be if you grew up,” she said wistfully, “either of you.”

“Edith—”

“You know what this reminds me of?” Edith asked him, and her gesture seemed to take in all of it, Mrs Elizabeth Kielar, Liv Hula’s bar, the long perspective of Straint Street that she wasn’t even looking at, Saudade itself, which was nothing but sand on the Beach, a refuelling stop on someone else’s big tour. “It reminds me of the fights.”