The Gone-Away World (53 page)

I
KE
T
HERMITE
and the Matahuxee Mime Combine have some kind of pilgrimage to make. Apparently a very well-considered mime once lived in Cricklewood Cove (to whatever extent mimes are ever well-considered), and when he died his dependants established his home as a small museum. Mimish artefacts are cased in glass and revered as relics of the Master. Bunsen burner and retort (for the making of greasepaint); soft shoes; sewing machine (it's hard to get good baggy pants these days); a wall of photographs of great moments. The Master shaking hands with the King of the UIK. The Master dancing the samba with two princesses. The Master doing “Climb Wall, Step in Something” for the Thai ambassador, who finds this hilarious. The Master in his one and only film,
The Quiet Life,
in which he plays a sombre assassin who just wants to be funny. Ike Thermite assures me it is fascinating, and a little sad. It is also the only museum in the world where there is no audio tour.

I am amazed that I have never been there. Ma Lubitsch took us to every museum in town when I was a kid. Ike Thermite points out gently that the Master was, at that time, still alive.

Ike walks off, a little bandy-legged (Annabelle's bench is stout and durable but hardly comfy), followed by a long line of polo necks and berets and respectful nodding. They're like a little army, very selfpossessed and serious. Their weirdness doesn't upset them. They are who they are.

Lucky them.

So here now is the corner of Lambic Street, where the old ironmonger's used to be, and here is Packlehyde Road. On my left, about two hundred yards away, is the Soames School. Off beyond a way is Doyle's Walk and the house at the end is the Warren, where Elisabeth lived when she wasn't sleeping at Wu Shenyang's. (And exactly how that came about would be a mystery to me if I hadn't met the
other
Assumption Soames, the real one, to whom the wretched old buzzard we knew as the Evangelist was a mask which allowed her to teach tolerance more effectively and prepare us all for the roads less travelled and the cannibals of life. Assumption must have been delighted to discover Master Wu, a crazed old coot packed with life skills and wisdom, on her doorstep, tutoring her daughter.)

In the other direction is the Lubitsch house. The original donkeys have gone to a better place, without fences or yapping dogs or Lydia Copsen to torment them with her inappropriate style choices. Old Man Lubitsch never said so, but I suspect they met their end during the Reification, when Cricklewood Cove was cut off (literally cut off at the southern end, where the sea poured into the shallow excision and made a new beach alongside the cinema) from the rest of the world. Food was scarce, and donkey eats well when the cupboard's bare. Gonzo believes that they died naturally, and are buried by the roses. And indeed, in a sense, they did, eaten by an apex predator in hard times.

Before the wedding, I had high tea with Gonzo's parents for the sake of Auld Lang Syne. Cricklewood Cove had seen some excitement in the long months of the Reification: brigands had come out of the hills, looking for things to eat and things to trade, but above all things to steal and people to kill; fearsome beasts had roamed the highways and mauled the mayor; Assumption Soames had led a small army against rumoured cannibals, but none had been found; and even since the Cove had been back on the map, there was word of vanishings—a place called Heyerdahl Point had apparently disappeared, been—so the breathless would have it—eaten entire by monsters. But everywhere was like that. The Cove was a refuge. It was simple and safe, something I very much needed amid the bustle of everyone getting ready to marry me. Old Man Lubitsch, craggier and spikier, muttering about monsters and brigands and the parlous state of the world, and building a big black bee house for special bees, would not come in from the cold. Ma Lubitsch smiled and took him a scone on a plastic plate.

I can't go to the Lubitsch house yet. It's not time. And I can't face the Evangelist either, still not knowing where Elisabeth may be. Her body was never recovered from Corvid's Field, but that proves nothing. Four billion people disappeared without trace back then. It's ludicrous to blame myself for this ignorance. I do, anyway. So the only other place is along Packlehyde Road to the edge of the new sea, to the Aggerdean Bluff and my parents' house.

.                           .                           .

S
OME MEMORIES ARE GREYSCALE
; paint-by-numbers. If you examine them in your head, your mind hurriedly glosses everything, fills in the spaces with tints and shades. If you turn your head too quickly, you catch yourself daubing the walls to match what you know was there but cannot actually recall. Others are all sensation, all colour and no detail. The living room of my parents' house—in memory—is a cool airy blue, with a dark oak fireplace and modern oil paintings in driftwood frames. It's like a living room cut into a glacier. In the same memories my father is a deep voice from an upward direction, a moving wall of woollen trouser and leather brogues. He is a source of unexpected swoops and presents wrapped inexpertly in newspaper. My mother is brown corduroy and a nurturing spoon. Her hands are cool upon my forehead, soothing my fevers, making magic on bruises and knocks. Neither of them, in my infant recollection, has a face, and actually that hardly changes as I get older. I can remember how I feel about their expressions, and what kind of expressions they are wearing, but in none of the images I have of them can I see a still image, a snapshot, of their faces. I am concerned I will not recognise them. And if I don't, how will they possibly know me, absent these many years?

I climb the hill on foot. My borrowed boots are a bit large, and my left heel is getting a blister on it. When I walk, I push my toe all the way forward into the boot. My heel comes down a half-centimetre or so from the back, and slides across the insole. For some reason a little patch just off-centre catches against the fabric. It is a slide-rub, the skin dragging and making an elongated patch, slowly filling with clear fluid. Tomorrow, I will resent it. Right now the sensation of the disconnected skin, rough and stretchy and no longer a part of me yet still connected, is a bit disgusting and a bit fascinating.

I remember this hill. It is a deceptive bugger. It is rippled, legacy of long-ago terraced agriculture. Just when you think you've done the hard bit, the hard bit begins again. The house is very dark up there. Perhaps they are not in. I climb. The blister stretches.

A car winds by. (Is it them? Will they recognise me? Stop and pick me up? No.) Another memory, of two slender shapes in the doorway of the house, graceful arms waving me off. Good luck. I remember thinking (child surly) that they were gladder to see me go than to return, that they enjoyed their unencumbered time. I remember Gonzo drawing me away to the playground or to school, consoling, endlessly creative. I remember unconditional gratitude. I know, from this distance, that he was lonely too. At the time it seemed like compassion.

Go out and play.
That, I remember. Cricklewood Cove was a place so safe I could be left alone. There must have been a childminder or a nursery club. I don't remember them either. I remember my parents as beautiful shapes waving from the porch, arm in arm. I remember them stepping gingerly through Lego. And yet they are the kind of memory you paint in. I have to strain to recall their faces. That happens too. The face of someone you have known all your life clouds as you look at it, and you realise that you remember
them,
for who they are and what they mean, far more than you remember what they look like. The mind plays tricks to stop us knowing how disconnected we are.

Another car goes by, executive swish. It could be theirs. It is not. Endless, my expectation of rescue.

Top of the hill. On the flat, the blister is surprisingly painful already. I soften my left knee, stiffen the ankle and foot a little, and keep walking.

There is no one on the veranda, no light on in the kitchen. No surprise.

The gate is dry. The catch is rusty. The metal has not been oiled; I can feel roughness in it through the wood. Voiceless Dragon style: keep contact, let your softness tell you where your enemy is going, when he will stop. Resistance is information. The gate resists, a tiny thorn of decaying metal snagging the hinge. I lean into my arm, and the rust breaks. The tiny flecks of my enemy tumble to the ground. The gate swings open.

The front door is painted black, glossy wrought-iron black. The key is where it should be, under the statue of the goddess Diana—a bit racy for Cricklewood Cove, now that I see it as an adult, with one breast bare and a very short toga covering her hips as she runs.

Key turns in the lock; it's quiet. I always have to shout to attract attention when I come in. Although I also seem to remember them being there, waiting. Well. They could hardly do that this time.

“Hi! I'm home! Just me. Hi.” The words fall flat on timber and paint.

There is no one here. The house is empty. It smells of empty, of old sheets, of resin leaking from wooden heirloom furniture, and dust. I walk down the hall, feeling that the walls are contracting around me, knowing it for a child's perspective. The hall isn't shrinking. I am larger. The hall was a grown-up place, where doors were answered and post delivered and exotic guests were welcomed (although I don't know who, now that I think about it), and where I was relinquished to Gonzo's care each morning and handed back by him later, or the following day. By the time I went to Jarndice, they were so rarely here. I used the back-door key, lived my own, sovereign life. In the intervening time we have somehow never spoken. There was no rift, just distance and time. I know they survived the war. I heard it somewhere, I think, or perhaps I just realise that I have not grieved, and from that I deduce their continuance.

The glacier room has huge windows and a great, throne-like chair. I remove the sheet and look at it. I remember it another colour, as if seen at dusk, a golden glow upon it. The shoulders and back of the chair are bleached from direct light. The room is filled with ghosts. Ghost legs. Ghost cocktails. Ghost parties. What parties? I remove some more sheets. I do not know the other furniture, just this chair. The one which is visible from the window. Have I sustained a head injury at any time, to forget my own life here? In the far wall there is a door. It leads to my father's den, mysteries of maleness. Will I find him in there, skin like parchment, dead these many years? Or making love, passionately, to a new wife? Is that why I haven't heard from them? I open the door with caution onto the panelled snug, balance to go down two steps, because the den was excavated to make it warm in the Cove's occasional chill, and for privacy besides.

The door opens onto a cupboard, bare and cold. Only the door is familiar—imposing, ornamental and false.

Rebuffed, I walk through the kitchen to the back, open the cellar door, which leads down to my old apartment, where Theresa Hollow made love to me the night of the great cannibal dog slaying. A narrow stair leads not down, but up. The room at the top is a sort of ghastly boudoir, filled with old-lady trophies.

I do not know this house.

It becomes increasingly obvious—painfully obvious—as I wander through it. I know it the way a stranger does, a passer-by or a curious child: I know it from the outside, its public spaces and the rooms in easy reach of the windows. I may have looked in. I have never inhabited it. And yet I remember my house behind this door. And where, in my home with Leah, this was clear evidence of infidelity, of terrible betrayal, here it simply cannot be. Impossible to imagine Gonzo has seduced my parents too, however great his successes. They have not divorced me and taken up with him. They have not remodelled the house to make the point to me. This was never my house to misremember. Points in evidence: the people who lived here had no children. Their home has no pencil marks on the frame of the kitchen door, no torn carpet or scratched paint. There is no room which might have been mine, no bunk bed, no cluttered, dingy bedroom where the young me might have sulked and sweated his way to adulthood. And the pictures of the inhabitants are not pictures of my parents. The names on the old letters in a tin box are not familiar, let alone familial. This house has a history, and I am not in it.

My chest is very tight. My eyes are itchy, sandy in their sockets. I can feel the pulse in them. I wonder if they will rupture. I turn, and turn, and turn, or perhaps the house does, or the world. Did I dream a life? Did I, perhaps, make it all up? Yes. Yes! That must be it. My real life is so drab or grim that I have created a fresh one from scratch. I have lost my grip. I am weeping on the landing, precarious. My mother—if she existed—would tell me to be careful, and when this did not penetrate my awful grief, would sit below me on the third step down, and hold me in her arms and wait to be sure I did not fall. I have no mother. The step is empty. Like the house. Like, in fact, every place I go.
Gonzo Lubitsch, I believe I hate you.

I roar without words, until my lungs are empty too. I laugh, and the sound of it is loud and unsettling, which encourages me, and I laugh louder. Then I cry, and the two become one. Quite deranged, sobbing and whooping in the dark of a burglarised manse. Deranged? I ponder. Yes! That would explain everything! My alternative life unfolds before me.