The PowerBook (16 page)

It has not been proved, but it might be so, that Ali is not telling stories, but that the stories are telling him. As he knots himself into a history that never happened and a future that cannot have happened, he is like a cross-legged Turk who knots a fine carpet and finds himself in the pattern.

As Ali knots himself into time, he has wondered if St Augustine might be right. A Catholic, who taught Ali to read, taught him that St Augustine had said that the universe was not created
in
time but
with
time.

This is true of the stories. They have no date. We can say when they were written or told, but they have no date. Stories are simultaneous with time.

Ali the storyteller is no longer sure when things happen. The happening and the telling seem to be tumbling over and over each other, like the acrobats who used to visit his village, turning their red and blue legs like the spokes of a wheel, round and round, faster and faster.

Ali is not a fool. He knows what day it is and that one day he will die. He knows how much money he has and how to avoid the people who would take it off him. He knows where he lives and the name of his little dog.

What he doesn’t know, really doesn’t know, is where he begins and the stories end. How can he know? The people who think they know define reality according to what is obvious and advise Ali to do the same. He would, gladly, but while what is obvious to them is also obvious to him, what is obvious to him is not obvious to them.

Ali tells stories. He puts himself in the stories. Once there, he cannot easily get out again, and the stories he has told cook up with the dinner he is eating and wrap round the sheets on the bed. What he is, what he invents, becomes part of the same story, one continuous story, where even birth and
death are only markers, pauses, changes of tempo. Birth and death become new languages, that is all.

The obvious people shake their heads, and say that when Ali is in his grave, that will be an end to his stories and an end to him.

Will it? Or will it be a shift to other mouths and other tales, while Ali, with his tale in his mouth, rolls on?

The Map. The Treasure.

In 1460 Giovanni da Castro, godson of Pope Pius II, returned to Italy from the Levant.

In his memoirs, Pius himself described what happened.

While Giovanni was walking through the forested mountains, he came on a strange kind of herb. He was surprised and noted that similar herbs grew on mountains of Asia which enrich the Turkish treasury with alum. He also observed white stones which appeared to have mineral in them. He bit one of them and found them salt. He smelted them, experimented and produced alum.

He then went to the Pope and said, ‘Today I bring you victory over the Turk. Every year they wring from the Christians more than 300,000 ducats for the alum with which we dye wool various colours. For alum is not found in Italy except a very small quantity on the island of Ischia near Puteoli, and this supply was depleted by the Romans in ancient times and is almost exhausted.

‘But I have found seven mountains so rich in this material that they could supply seven worlds …’

Giovanni takes up the story himself.

All day I had been searching for a pearl earring lost in my chamber by my mistress. At evening, restless and despondent, I could think of nothing at all. I walked out to brood on this life of ours, which seems from birth to death to be a steady loss, disguised by sudden gains and happiness, which persuade us of good fortune, when all the while the glass is emptying.

‘Eat stones for bread,’ I said to myself, and picking up a rock began to gnaw it. It was salty. It was then that I began my explorations of the mountain.

Imagine my surprise when I found not one mountain but seven, each supplying in abundance what we had most needed and most lacked. I have walked in these mountains since I was a child. Since I was a child I have walked back and forth
over the riches and prospect for which I had dreamed.

Everything I had sought had been under my feet from the beginning.

The world is a mirror of the mind’s abundance

The Map. The Treasure.

There’s no Netscape Navigator to help me find my way around life. I have to do it myself and my helpers are unexpected and odd. Of course, I can take a planned route, like those things you buy on the highway to tell you which way to go. There are plenty of organised tours and arranged excursions. I need miss no Ancient Monument or World Heritage Site. I can even go off-track, provided I follow the way-markers. If I want to go on safari, I can do it from the safety of a jeep, but I must not, must not, get out and stare at the lions.

Why not?

They will eat me.

A lion did eat a tourist recently. The lion was then trapped and shot, and when the hunters cut him open they found a whole leg, foot and training shoe in his stomach. Also a booklet warning the tourist about the danger of lions.

Lions are dangerous. True.

Lions live in the Wilderness. True.

How else am I going to find the Promised Land, if not by way of the lions?

There’s no guarantee that I will find what I’m
looking for. Should that deter me? We all want guarantees these days—for rising damp, bank deposits, washing machines, computer compliance, pedigree status, stain remover, marriage and torch batteries. Is this because life comes with no guarantees at all?

There are no guarantees. I just have to risk it.

There was a day, years and years ago, when I tried to escape from the Muck House. I took a ladder and leaned it against the high wall that kept us in and the world out. I was three rungs away from the top of the ladder when I felt it shake down below. I didn’t need to look down to know that my mother was trying to shake me off like an apple from a tree.

‘Get down here!’

I got down, and as I hit the ground my mother hit me twice across the face.

‘What do you think you were playing at?’

‘I wanted to see the Wilderness.’

‘There’s nothing there. You know that.’

‘If there’s nothing there, it can’t harm me.’

‘Nothing is the most dangerous thing of all.’

‘Why?’

‘If there’s nothing there, you can invent something. You won’t be able to bear the emptiness. It will still be empty, but you’ll tell yourself it’s not.’

‘What I tell myself is true.’

‘What you tell yourself is a story.’

‘This is a story—you, me, the Muck House, the treasure.’

‘This is real life.’

‘How do you know?’

‘No one would ever pay to watch it.’

She turned to go in to the battered house. Then she turned to me again.

‘And I would pay anything not to live it.’

‘Don’t live it. Change it.’

‘You don’t understand, do you?’

‘Understand what?’

‘This is real life.’

And I thought of us, years and years later, you and I, in Paris, and how you seemed to be saying we had every choice, every chance. You acted as
though you were free, but you were a ransom note. I paid to watch. I watched your fingers, your red mouth. I watched you undress. I didn’t see you go.

Later I was still paying and I never counted the cost. You were worth it. Again and again you were worth it. My heart has unlimited funds. Draw on them. Draw them down. Draw me down on top of you. How much? Everything? All right.

The glittering river and the soft evening were a promise. The world had just begun. It was only a day old. It was the day we met. The promise is that the world is always beginning again. No accumulations of the past can stop it. Another day. Another chance.

Does nobody believe this? You didn’t. Nothing I offered could free you because you couldn’t free yourself. You were wayward, but you still wanted to follow the path.

I thought of us, that afternoon in Paris, after we had escaped from the rain. The sun came out and the pavements shone. It was as though the streets had been silvered into a mirror, and we could see
the buildings and the statues and our own faces multiplied by the glass pyramid of the Louvre and the smooth flat mirror of the rain.

It was after the flood. The past had been drowned, but we had been saved. In the multiple possibilities of the mirror we could have taken any direction we wanted.

Drops of rain fell from the hem of our coats and from the falling weight of your hair. Each one was a complete world, a crystal ball of chance that held our future. Let them fall. There were so many, so many chances, so many futures. When I brushed away the rain from your forehead, aeons broke back into the waters where they were made. We were universes dripping with worlds. All we had to do was choose.

‘Noah must have felt like this.’

‘Soaked?’

‘Free.’

Imagine it.

The floodwaters subside and the ark comes to rest on top of Mount Ararat. The dove returns with an olive branch in her mouth.

Imagine it. Years and years later, the ground is long since dry and fertile, and the boat is still up there, beached on its mountain-top like a memory point.

I look back on it, amazed. I can hardly believe it is there—absurd, impossible testimony to something that never happens.

But it did happen. It happened to us.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.

Through the streets, you and I, hand in hand, like a pair of twins spun out of the constellations.

The earth was all before us. The day was innocent of past and future. There were no decisions, no reminders, just the day and us in it.

Two Buddhists in saffron robes were chanting and dancing in front of a portable shrine.

‘Be here now,’ you said.

‘What?’

‘The Buddhist Way.’

I laughed. I knew you were right. You spent the day convincing me that you were right, and when I slept with you it was in that nowness, that rightness.

Through the streets, you and I, and our footprints seemed to burn in the water. The steam rose up round us as we walked, as though our feet had been shod.

Shod or branded? You marked me that day and nothing can cool the wound.

Night.

I’m at home in Spitalfields. I live above the shop. The sign on the shop just says
VERDE
and no one can see inside. The big windows in their old wooden frames have blinds pulled down over the lower panes. The clock ticks, but only in time. There are shadows on the ceiling—a bear’s head, a knife.

In a minute I’ll go downstairs into the shop and start pinning up a story somebody wants for tomorrow. I hope it fits.

Meanwhile the City boys, with their home-time faces, are loosening their ties, forgetting the closing price of Internet stocks and looking for a drink. The deli next door is still slicing Parma ham. I can hear the whirr of the blade as I go downstairs.

A quick glance outside and there’s the Hawksmoor church, and the ABN bank, and the little man with his coffee van, packing up to go home. In the huge spaces of the abandoned market, off-duty traders are playing softball.

I shut the door just in time to avoid the Jack
the Ripper Tour. My house is on the route, and students and pensioners and earnest Americans in track shoes huddle together outside the shop-front, staring at the old notices on the shutters, gazing in fascination at the front door, half-believing that the Ripper will come out, dressed as a midwife or a nurse or an oyster seller, or whatever disguises he took from all the disguises inside.

Across the road, the Dracula Tour is warming up. Why, I don’t know. Spitalfields is nowhere near Transylvania or Whitby, and even in Roman times, it never had a sea coast.

But this is an old house.

The first night I slept here, I slept in the basement. Somewhere in the uncertain hours of the night, I heard footsteps clattering down the stairs. I sat up and called out—‘Who is that?’

No answer. I lay back, certain that I was not alone, and then a hand gently took hold of mine, just above the wrist, on the pulse. After a moment, as if to see which one of us was alive, the hand let go of mine, and whatever it was stood by the bed, breathing.