The Weightless World (13 page)

Lying there, with genuine interest I wondered what was wrong with me. What was wrong with me? Was it that I resented Alice’s insinuation that the life of a person who has a terminally ill brother is somehow more substantial, more ponderous, more profound, than the life of a person who doesn’t? Or was it that I resented the fact that she was right, that my life was a soap bubble in a breeze, worthless, weightless?

About two o’clock in the morning I crashed down into her on the couch. I pressed my nose into her hair and told her I was sorry. She told me I’d better be.

In the storage shed I’m still staring at the blank screen when I realise why Alice is annoyed with me. She’s annoyed with me because I didn’t reply to Daniel’s email. Because I said that I would reply to it, that I wouldn’t forget, and I did forget, and I
didn’t reply to it. Because I am a liar, a fool, a dick, and no one should trust me to do anything ever.

I check my phone. Still nothing from Martin Cantor.

I left my message seven hours ago. I’ve been patient, respectful of the man and his status. But this is ridiculous.

I call the number again, get shunted to voicemail again, leave another message:

‘Hi, Martin? Steven Strauss. Sorry to bother you again. Sorry also if I sounded like a madman on that other message, I think I’d been too long in the sun! Anyway, I’d just be really grateful if you could find the time to give me a quick call back. Hope everything’s all right there with you. Okay. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye bye.’

I cancel the call and I’m ready to scream with it – the frustration, the fear. I swear, loudly and foully, at the gritty clutter of the storage shed.

I need to find Ess. I need to tell him that we’ve no money. I need to tell him Harry isn’t to be trusted, that the old bastard is up to something. I need to find Ess and look him in the face and tell him pretty much that the whole deal is slipping away from us.

And then, if he wants to kill me, that’s no business of mine.

But by the time I step outside again the only person left in view is Tarik, collecting up the rugs on which we ate dinner. As I walk towards him I notice the angry bounce of his bend as he reaches for a rug’s edge, the furious swipe of his hand as he catches the edge and starts tussling the rug into a roll. He’s in a rage, probably in no mood for a conversation. I should leave him alone, go back to the shed. But I need to find Ess and so I
pause a few steps away from Tarik then carefully ask, ‘Where’d everybody go?’

‘Excellent question,’ he says, hefting the rug as if attempting to injure it.

I notice a patch of green light inside Harry’s camp. That accounts for the old bastard, at least. But: ‘Where’s Ess?’ And, for that matter: ‘Where’s Asha?’

‘Where are they?’ Tarik steps towards me, allowing the rug to topple behind him, and stabs a finger into the darkness. ‘Exactly where I ask them not to go. And so they go.’

‘They went to the village?’

‘Where’s the harm, yes? I just need to lighten up, yes?’ Returning to the toppled rug, he makes a guttural sound of disgust. ‘Where’s the
harm
…’

Ess and Asha have gone to the village. Crashingly I realise that’s why Ess wanted to go to there today – why with that concentrated expression he went seeking a helpful local such as Laxman. He was scouting for a place, a boarding house, a spare room, where he and Asha could spend the night without the prospect of another interruption.

For a moment I stand appalled, amazed (
the crafty fucker!
), then I shake my arms and legs as if warming up for vigorous exercise and say to Tarik, ‘Let me give you a hand…’ and start pulling at another of the rugs.

He gives me a furious look but doesn’t try to stop me helping, and between us we gather up the rest of the rugs and haul them one at a time over the single step into the cabin then across the floor to their corner next to his hammock. We’re fitting the last two into the heap when we both seem to become aware that I’ve entered the cabin. Tarik steps away from me and instinctively goes to stand by the workbench, on which his machine now rests. At some point he must have gone to retrieve it from the
test site. I stay on the other side of the room, but wave at the machine and say, ‘It’s fantastic. Your invention.’

‘Thank you.’ A flicker, a stutter of a smile.

I should go, but now I’ve seen it I can’t take my eyes off Tarik’s machine. The jagged black plastic case, cut and soldered together from this and that; the insulation-tape joins; the French plait of wires. I need to say something, but all I can think of is, ‘Was it difficult?’

‘That rather depends on what you mean.’ He raises his chin. ‘If you mean was this one difficult to make, yes, it was exceedingly difficult to make. If you mean will it be difficult to copy, no. I imagine with your resources you will have no difficulty replicating the device. You will find the key elements may be easily and cheaply synthesised into a chip. After that, I expect your greatest challenges will involve questions of marketing. The design, the body, the form factor. The brand. The logo. The price. Once those questions are dealt with, I’m sure you and your colleagues will become extremely rich.’

‘And you,’ I say. ‘You’ll become rich too.’

The smile that stutters on then off again looks like the most authentic bit of a smile I’ve yet seen out of him. It is incredibly sad.

‘Won’t that be nice,’ he says.

I look at the workbench, notice that the toolbox that isn’t a toolbox has gone, maybe never existed, that the laptop is still cycling its slideshow of a very fat woman smiling against different backgrounds of sun-spattered trees. I wave at the laptop and say, ‘Is that…?’

He glances at the screen. ‘Reva. My wife.’

‘She looks…’ I have no idea why I started this sentence. She looks what? She looks fat. She looks enormous. ‘She looks… happy.’

He goes on staring at the laptop. ‘That day she was happy. She was always happy in Cubbon Park.’

‘Do you… still see her?’

Tarik doesn’t look up at me straight away. When he does, there’s no expression on his face, none at all. ‘Good night, Mr Strauss.’

Back at the storage shed I check my phone. Still nothing from Martin Cantor.

I search my phone book for Resolute’s main number. Okay then: if the cunt’s lying low in his office, I’ll get one of the girls on reception to put a call through and smoke him out. What is it – Tuesday? Wednesday? Two, three in the afternoon? Chances are I’ll get either Becca or Manda, both old mates, so…

‘You have dialled an incorrect number. Please hang up and try again.’

I haven’t dialled any number. I just hit ‘Call’ on the number that’s always been there.

‘You have dialled an incorrect number. Please hang up and try again.’

It takes me a while to get there, but I get there.

Resolute is gone. No more now than an empty space, a vacant property, without even ringing phones.

As soon as there’s light enough to see by next morning, I go up to the test site. I walk a full circle round the first of the blocks I come to, then using the rope knot on its outward end as a handhold, and then as a foothold, I climb on top of it. Sitting on the rough concrete, I check that I have a complete view of the surrounding area then open my shoulder bag and take out my water bottle and my cigarettes.

After about an hour Harry emerges from his camp. I watch as he goes to the latrine, rolls in the dust in what I eventually realise is a sort of morning exercise regime, then goes to Tarik’s cabin and knocks on the door. Tarik opens the door, he and Harry briefly talk, then they go into the cabin together. I watch, I wait, I smoke a cigarette.

I’m still staring at the cabin door when out of a corner of my eye I register movement, and I see them: Ess and Asha, returning from the village. While they’re still hardly more than specks negotiating the whorls of the plain, I can tell all is not well between them. They move at different paces, with different rhythms, and as soon as they reach the edge of Tarik’s compound Asha speeds ahead, strides up to the Adventurers car and slams herself into it. Ess changes direction and veers down towards the river.

I leave it for as long as I can. (After all, he’s going to kill me.) Then I slither down the side of the block and start in his direction.
‘We need to talk.’

‘Oh yes?’ He’s kneeling on the riverbank, shirtless, lifting cupped handfuls of water into his hair, over his head. He turns and sits and smiles at me with a coursing face.

I’m standing and he’s sitting. Nervously I sit too, then realise too late I’m sitting too far away. But what am I supposed to do? Slide towards him on my arse? I stay where I am, blink at the sluggish brown river, try to think of a way of saying what I have to say. He waits with a pleasant, unsurprised air. Then I say, ‘We’ve no money.’

‘No,’ he says.

‘The account Cantor gave you, it’s bullshit. Resolute didn’t give us any money. They just wanted you out of the way while they dissolved the company.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he says.

I stare at him. His face coursing down, staying exactly where it is. ‘You know?’

‘Oh yes.’ He flattens his hair with both hands. ‘I assume you’ve been “following the drama” online? There’s been some scrappy stuff, I can tell you. Quite scratchy stuff.’

‘They thought you’d make trouble,’ I say. ‘They…’

‘Where I take it “they” refers to Martin Cantor?’

‘… Yes.’

‘Who asked you if you would be so good as to take the old man off on his jaunt while the big boys do the serious work of breaking up his company?’

‘… Something like that.’

‘I suppose he said he’d look after you? Once the dust settles?’

‘Actually, no.’ It’s true. Cantor made me no promises. ‘I’m so sorry, Ess.’

‘I know. I knew it was going to be hard for you, hard to believe… especially with my recent escapades. But I also knew that, once you saw it, you’d be with me.’

‘I
am
,’ I say, earnestly, passionately, ‘I
am
with you. I’m just so… so…’

‘Well. Enough of that.’

‘But we’re here, and the machine works, and we’ve no money…’

‘Yes, yes. Not the end of the world, is it?’

I stare at him. His face isn’t coursing down any more but I still can’t get a fix on it.

He says, ‘As it happens, we have something rather more valuable then money. At least as far as Tarik’s concerned.’ He waits. Then he says, ‘You see, we have his wife.’

‘What?’ I’m sitting down but all at once I can’t get my balance. ‘We have his
what
?’

‘Good lord, that sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Forgive me, Mr Strauss, but I haven’t been completely open with you. I haven’t told you quite everything I might.’

And then he tells me the story.

Once upon a time there was a boy called Tarik who lived in a village on the outskirts of a great city. He lived in a house with his father, mother and two brothers. The family lived in a house and not a hut because Tarik’s father was the wealthiest man in the village, a merchant and landowner wealthier even than the village headman, who lived in a house too.

He was an anxious child, Tarik was. It seemed the anxiety was there before he was; anxiety that he lived in a house with brick walls and a slate roof while the other kids at school lived in huts of wood, clay and thatch; anxiety that these same children and his brothers too enjoyed in their bodies a litheness of movement he could find nowhere in his, a spangling jitter whose presence in wrists and ankles made even the poorest of his classmates solemn and gorgeous while he, lacking it, trembled like a sickly dog. He
hated school, the dirt, the crush, the constant reminder in the press of flesh on his at all times that he was defective, missing a crucial part that others possessed so naturally they were not even aware of it.

In his corner of the crowded classroom he did everything he could not to be present – to withdraw, to vanish. Sometimes he tried to vanish into the teacher’s shrill, violent voice; sometimes into the surface of the slate he balanced on his knees, the cracks, the jags, the zagging grain; sometimes into the work the class was set, the grammar tests, the sums. But he soon discovered there was nowhere he could vanish to, nowhere at all.

One day after school the teacher walked home with him. The teacher’s silence left no room for doubt that he’d done something dreadful, though he didn’t know what. As they walked, he grew certain that the moment he’d always feared had finally arrived: the moment when his defect was revealed, when he was reviled and cast out.

Arriving at the house, the teacher spoke quietly to one of Tarik’s brothers, who went inside then returned with their father.

‘There is a grave problem with young Tarik here,’ the teacher said to his father.

‘Is that so?’ His father’s easy smile told Tarik at once that his father was prepared to beat him: to pound out of him whatever sin was in him.

The teacher passed Tarik’s father his slate – the one on which he’d completed the afternoon’s sums. ‘It would appear that he’s a genius.’

‘Oh yes?’ Tarik’s father’s face looked suddenly jolted, shocked, shivered.

‘It would appear so. Which creates for us the grave problem of what to do with him.’

The grave problem became the daily task and battle of Tarik’s father for the next ten years. He determined to make the problem
the village’s problem – ‘our gift, our burden’ – and engaged in frequent lengthy meetings with the headman, meetings for which Tarik was always required to be present, at least at the beginnings and ends of them, freshly scrubbed in his best shirt and spectacles, with his slate in his hand, like a prop. While the meetings were in progress Tarik was allowed to sit in the kitchen and work on the tasks he’d been set by his very expensive private tutor from the city.

One humid afternoon Tarik was sitting in the headman’s kitchen, struggling with a task, when the headman’s daughter came into the room. She was tiny, dark, beautiful. She didn’t go to school, because she was the headman’s daughter. Her name was Reva.

Without speaking, she leant over the table and stared at his slate. She nodded then looked at him in a weird way: the eyes luminous, questioning, slightly bulging.

‘You can’t do it, can you?’ she said.

‘I can do it,’ he said.

‘You can’t do it. And it’s
easy
.’

She was right. He couldn’t do it. And she picked up his chalk and solved it and she made it look easy. He was twenty. She was sixteen.

‘How did you do that?’ he asked.

‘How did I do what? I don’t do anything, I’m not here, I don’t exist.’ He saw then that the bulging of her eyes was not a look but something she couldn’t help, an imperfection that was also part of her beauty. He saw also that she was about ten times as clever as he was. This was a part of her beauty too.

He studied in the city. During the week he slept on a cot in his uncle’s flat and at weekends he returned to the village to pay his respects to the headman and the headman’s daughter. By the time he was twenty-five he’d still obtained no solid evidence that Reva’s interest in him extended to anything more than the tasks
he brought her – the homework he more or less brought her to do for him. Then, one afternoon, he obtained solid evidence. Twenty-one, glistening with intelligence and her new womanly fullness, she put down the chalk and picked up his hand. She looked at him with her bulging eyes.

‘There is a grave problem with young Tarik here,’ she said.

‘There is,’ he agreed, and put his other hand over hers, and two years later with the blessing of both fathers they were married.

After he completed his studies Tarik took a prestigious job at a prestigious company in the city – an electronics company with a reputation for innovation. Tarik and Reva moved into a flat in the city’s fashionable downtown. They were happy. Tarik gained the respect of his colleagues, was admiringly addressed in the lab as ‘the boy wonder’, was assigned important roles on fascinating projects. Reva made friends, went modestly shopping, and continued at home to more or less do Tarik’s work for him.

They’d been living this prosperous life for almost a year when Tarik began to notice a change in Reva. She grew quiet, irritable. She approached the tasks he brought her no longer as a ravishing pleasure but an annoyance, an inconvenience, while at the same time she seemed to have nothing else to do. She went out less and less often with her friends. Less and less often she presented him with the fruits of her modest shopping sprees.

He came home from work one day and found her crying. She told him that she hated the city, hated city people, hated her city friends and wanted to go back to the village. In the village, she said, she was beautiful. But here she was ugly. Here, she said, she was fat.

‘You’re what?’ He had literally no idea what she was talking about.

‘You’ve seen the women here. They’re sticks, they’re wisps. And I’m…’

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.

‘Village beautiful. Here I’m a potbellied pig.’

‘Here you’re beautiful. Everywhere you’re beautiful. You’re everywhere beautiful.’

But it did no good. She stayed in the flat, refused to see her friends – who, she said, were all having ‘gym parties’ and would only ‘snigger into their sweatpants’ if she were to go ‘waddling in’. At least she was able to laugh about it, for a while. Then she wasn’t able to laugh about it. She became prickly, spiky, all the time. She cried. She told him she was too tired to do his work, or else she threw the papers away from her and told him to do his own fucking job. And she grew fat. By the time they’d been living in the city two years her village beauty had gone, her womanly fullness receded behind a veil of intricate flab. She seemed wreathed with it, ornamented with it, as if for a terrible wedding.

Tarik’s work suffered – because, for the first time, it was truly his own. It turned out the village teacher had overestimated him, and he was a very bright fellow, but not a genius. His work for the company was excellent but no longer astonishing. Among his colleagues disappointment set in. The ‘boy wonder’ tag detached, dissolved. The assignments grew less fascinating. At home his wife grew sadder and fatter and in the lab he sat desperately working on small-time projects for spare-change money.

One evening he came home to find her staring into space. She’d fallen down on the bedroom floor and couldn’t get up. The rubber ring, the perverse flotation device of her own fat had defeated all her efforts. She’d been there for six hours and had filthied herself.

That weekend he built a chair for her. She wouldn’t get into it, screamed at him, wept. Then one day the following week he came home and she’d started to use it.

Six years, eight years. Tarik had painful little successes at work, painful little failures. Reva grew lighter, grew heavier. But they
lived no moment that was not pulled between these poles, these gravities.

Then all at once she was happy again. She was still fat, but happy, full of energy. When he came through the door he noticed everywhere signs of deliveries during the day: boxes, polystyrene packing blocks, sheets of bubble-wrap that combusted under his feet like gunfire. She told him she was working on ‘a project’ of her own. Cheerfully she presented him with her online purchases – not the saris or jeans or shoes of her earlier sprees but a soldering iron, a welding kit, a pack of circuit-boards.

One Friday afternoon several months later she called him at work and told him in a voice breathless with urgency that he had to come home right away. He vaulted up the nine flights to their flat, his heart in his mouth. She was waiting for him, in the sitting room, in her chair. She asked if he was ready. He said, ‘Ready for what?’ He noticed the modification she’d made to her chair, a ragged bit of circuit with a trailing wire and switch in it attached to the armrest, only when she depressed her right thumb into the switch.

The next thing he saw was that two things had happened to her face. It had changed its position in the room, and it was laughing. It was the most frightening thing he’d ever seen.

The next thing he saw was that her chair had risen three feet above the floor.

‘How did you do that?’ Because she was laughing, he started to laugh too.

‘How did I do what?’ She laughed harder, slapped the arms of her chair.

Grandly she invited his examinations. He took the mop and swept it back and forth under the chair. He waved an arm under the chair, then both arms. He climbed up into the chair and sat in her lap. She picked lazily at his head, subjected it to her usual
search for dandruff, and told him with luminous, lantern-like eyes, ‘Now I’m beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ Tarik said. He had no idea what she meant.

She showed him her schematics for the miraculous chair modification and he was still puzzling over them when she fell asleep. In her chair he floated her to the bedroom and rolled her gently out onto the mattress and pulled the sheet up to her chin. Then he went back to the schematics and to the sticking, snagging nag of his idea.