The PowerBook (12 page)

Life was a journey I would have to make by myself.

Myself. If they gave me nothing, that was the one thing they could not take away.

I think of myself sometimes, unable to walk, unable to crawl, lying in my cot and listening to the sound of the trams on their metal rails. At night, outside the window, there was a room opposite with a big globe pendant light made of white china. It looked like the moon. It looked like another world.

I used to watch it until the image of it became sleep, and until the last tram whooshed past, the bend in the road made audible by the air concer-tina’d in the rubber pleats that joined the cars.

The globe and the tram were my companions and the certainty of them, their unfailingness, made bearable the smell of sour milk and the high bars of the cot and the sound of feet on the polished oilcloth—feet always walking away.

My mother, they say, was a little red thing out of the Manchester mills, who at seventeen gave birth to me, easy as a cat.

Her voice was soft—like the river over the chalk pan of the riverbed. You will say I never heard it, but I heard it every day in the nine months that I was her captive or she was mine.

I knew her voice and I must have seen her face once, mustn’t I?

Voice and face are homed somewhere in me as I was homed in her. It was a brief eternity waiting for time to begin. Then time tumbled me out, cut me loose, and set the clock—RUN! RUN! Put as much distance as you can between you and then.

To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run.

Night. I’m sitting at my screen, wondering how this story might develop. An envelope flies in front of my face. I open it. What else can you do?

‘Ali. I’m coming to London.’

(I’d better reply. What else can you do?) ‘Business or pleasure?’

‘I want to see you.’

‘I thought we weren’t seeing each other.’

‘We’re not.’

‘Are you going to keep your eyes closed then?’

‘I’d always know you in the dark.’

‘Cut it out.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘You’ve got my Website.’

‘Meatspace not cyberspace.’

‘Spitalfields.’

‘Where?’

‘I live in Spitalfields.’

‘Sounds revolting.’

‘It’s right in the City. Roman London, Falstaff London, Dickens London.’

This part of the city is an Emperor’s maze of streets that darken into alleys, and alleys that blank into walls. The noise of the river is nearby, but the water itself is unseen. It is as though the water is everywhere and nowhere, perhaps under the streets, perhaps inside the houses, with their watery windows where the old glass reflects the light.

This part of the city has always been a place for refugees. Exile or sanctuary, they come here and have done since the Huguenots with their bales of cloth, since the Bengalis with their sweatshops, and since the quiet people from Hong Kong with their money.

Beside all of this has always been the life of the traders—English, Spanish, Dutch, selling gassed oranges and arsenals of lemons the size of hand grenades.

The yellow faces of the Chinamen were once downriver where the opium boats came in. Now the yen trades with the euro and alongside the oldest profession, which has always thrived here and still does—the short skirts by the hot-dog stand in front of the church.

In an old part of the city like this, time collapses the picture.

Here I am, tightrope walking the twenty-first century, slim as a year, and the old tall houses are two hundred years old and set on streets that wind back four hundred years, set on cart tracks that served medieval monks. Or Shakespeare. Or Dr Johnson and his friend Boswell the Scot. They all walked here. Put any of them here now and they would still recognise the place.

Put me here now and that single year’s rope, stretched towards the future, is all I have to balance me from the drop on either side.

There’s an Indian grocer’s here. Bundles of coriander make a hedge between shop and pavement, and behind are the trays of chillies and stacked-up cartons of long-life milk.

Every week the frozen fish van arrives, and two Bengalis drag out something the size of Moby Dick. Two more stagger out to the pavement with a steel workbench and a circular saw. Moby Dick is slabbed onto the steel. The saw screams. The
unnameable grey-coloured fish is neatly bagged into curry-sized portions.

Next door, the Halal butcher gently drains the blood of a sheep into a plastic bath.

‘When I first came here as a boy,’ an old cab driver tells me, ‘the first morning I woke up, I looked out of the window and there was a street market going on in Petticoat Lane and a bloke selling a lion cub—sitting like a cat it was, washing its paws—just like a cat of yours or mine.

‘Over there was a strong man in chains, freeing hisself, and then a Black Shirt got up, you know, one of Mosley’s Fascists, and he made a speech and then a fight broke out, and there was a whistle, and the police came running down from Brick Lane, only nobody got caught because the gutter was thick with offal from the meat stall, and half of the coppers slipped on it and the other half fell over them.’

Ask anyone round here for a story and you’ll get one.

The archaeologists were digging here yesterday. They uncovered a stone sarcophagus shielding a decorated lead coffin.

It had been there for one thousand eight hundred years.

The guess is that inside the coffin will be the Roman Governor of London, his body basted in a plaster and chalk mix used as a disinfectant.

They dug him up when they were excavating the foundations of a new bank—the kind of Temple to Mammon that the Governor would have approved of. Maybe that’s why they chose the site. Maybe he was what attracted them, although they could never admit it. Maybe through all the talk of land value and client access and transport links and investment opportunity, maybe behind the glassy eyes of the Chief Accountant, maybe in the dreams of the Chairman of the Board, maybe floating under the skin of a thousand cups of coffee at a hundred planning meetings, maybe between the lines of the shiny facts and figures sent out to the shareholders, maybe in the tremble of the blood inside the hand that held the pen that
signed the cheque that bought the site, was the will of a dead man waiting for his final tribute.

Far-fetched?

The past is magnetic. It draws us in. We cannot help ourselves and, as with other things that we cannot help in ourselves, we make up elaborate explanations, reasonable rational explanations, to chant away the powerful things that don’t belong to us.

There he is, coming slowly up the Thames in his rowed barge. That’s him, the one with the cropped hair and the clean fingernails.

On either side of the broad river are marshes and dull sand, and deeper in are forests as tight-grown as a cash crop. But these forests are wild and the unseen eyes that watch him are as far from civilisation as he is from home.

His men have lit a brazier in the prow of the boat. They use it to keep warm. They use it as a light. The olive stones they use as fuel burn down to a powder, and when a man rakes it he smells his
homesickness in the sharp salty greenness of the fire.

So the boat slips on, and to the eyes watching in the forest it is the fire itself coming upriver. The fire moving steadily through the dark and the mist. The impossibility of fire and water. The fire that will spread into the trees, into the settlements, into the huts of the Britons themselves, until all resistance has been burned away.

Or has it?

The forests can be levelled and the roads made straight, but the wild things go deeper, beyond detection, and wait.

‘
Open it …
’

‘Everybody ready?’

‘
For Christ’s sake, open it!
’

The sarcophagus is surrounded by men in green masks, as though this site were an operating theatre. Outside the TV crews and the journalists are waiting for the most significant discovery yet unearthed in Roman London.

‘When we see his body, it will tell us everything.’

‘The kind of man he was, his power …’

‘OK. Everybody ready? Here we go.’

With infinite care, the side of the tomb is being opened. A trickle of brown water seeps out.

‘
Oh Christ How did that get in there?
’

‘This thing should be airtight, waterproof.’

‘It was bombproof. It has survived eighteen hundred years.’

‘
Bombproof but not waterproof, huh?
’

‘Shut up and open it.’

Cloth of gold, leaves, mud, a skeleton. Serious water damage … And …

‘Look at the pelvis.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a woman.’

You had come to London.

We were in bed together, watching the sun stream through the window. I was happy in a sad sort of way, because I knew this was never going to work.

Work. Not work. What do I mean?

If someone had told Mallory that he would climb Everest but die in the attempt, still he would have climbed it.

What does the end matter?

Here, now, is enough, isn’t it?

You had once asked me if I was afraid of death.

I said I was afraid of not living.

I don’t want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.

Here’s my life—I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant it, and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed.

This is my chance. Take it.

You rolled over so that I could stroke your back.

Sex between women is mirror geography. The subtlety of its secret—utterly the same, utterly different. You are a looking-glass world. You are the hidden place that opens to me on the other side of the glass. I touch your smooth surface and then my fingers sink through to the other side. You are what the mirror reflects and invents. I see myself, I see you, two, one, none. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to know. Kiss me.

You kiss me and the glass grows cloudy. I stop thinking. Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

Dear love—with your hair like a bonfire that somebody kicked over—red, spread out, sparks flying. I don’t want to conquer you; I just want to climb you. I want to climb through the fire until I am the fire.

Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans, dogged with an ending that nobody wants—when all love is, is what it
always is—that you look at me and want me and I don’t turn away.

If I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave the finale. Leave the grand statements. The simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. I can’t work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. The admission charge is never on the door, but you are open and I want to enter.

Let me in.

You do.

In this space which is inside you and inside me I ask for no rights or territories. There are no frontiers or controls. The usual channels do not exist. This is the orderly anarchic space that no one can dictate, though everyone tries. This is a country without a ruler. I am free to come and go as I please. This is Utopia. It could never happen beyond bed. This is the model of government for the world. No one will vote for it, but everyone comes back here. This is the one place where everybody comes.

Most of us try to turn this into power. We’re too scared to do anything else.

But it isn’t power—it’s sex.

Sex. How did it start?

In the strange dark history of our evolution, there was a shift, inevitability, away from self-reproducing organisms—like bacteria—towards organisms which must fuse with one another to survive.

You see, bacteria know the secret of eternal life. They do not die unless something kills them. They don’t change, they don’t age, all they do is multiply.

Fusion allows complexity and diversity, but with it, we don’t know why, hand in hand, came death in the first of her many disguises. Death disguised as life.

It was our only chance. We took it.

So those morbid medievals and those burning Romantic poets weren’t wrong. Sex and death belong together, joined in our imaginations as they are in our DNA.

Sex and death are our original parents. For some of us, the only family we’ll ever have.