The Weightless World (16 page)

‘Tarik? What’s this now?’

‘Forgive me,’ he murmurs.

‘It’s okay…’

‘I could have shot you.’ He holds the gun away from himself, still pointing it at the ground, as if struggling to repulse a disgusting animal. ‘How can you forgive me?’

‘Hey, it’s okay, you didn’t mean it…’

‘I could have killed you.’ For an instant his eyes and lips seize up, clench in the teeth of their static; then they tick free and recommence their squirming, their writhing. ‘Everything is very dangerous now.’

‘No…’ I say, no idea what either of us is talking about.

‘The ones who want me dead are close now.’

‘What? No…’

‘I saw them.’ With the hand not keeping the gun gripped in its posture of submission, he waves at the darkness, the plain. ‘I saw their faces… watching…
spying
…’

‘You didn’t see anyone…’ In fact I’m guessing he did see someone – Laxman, gofering for Ess or mucking about – but I’m also guessing this isn’t the time to get into all that. ‘There’s no one else out here.’

‘They’ve come to kill me. Do you think I should let them?’ Tarik braces himself as if to hurl the gun away, to fling it into the darkness, then doesn’t. The gun sags in his hand again. Again his head drops. ‘Why shouldn’t they kill me?’

Carefully, keeping my eyes on the gun, I take Tarik by the shoulders. I say his name until he looks up at me and then I say,
‘I don’t know who you think is here, but you’re wrong. There’s no one here. It’s just us. No one here wants to kill you.’

‘Yes,’ Tarik seems to say.

‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘That’s right. You see? No one here wants to kill you.’

‘No, no.
Yes
,’ Tarik seems to say.

‘Yes what? I don’t…’

‘No,’ Tarik says. ‘
Ess
.’

‘What? Ess doesn’t want to…’

‘He brought them to me. Led them to me.’ The eyes, the lips, chafing between frames.

‘Oh, now, come on, Ess has his faults, but I don’t believe he…’

‘He led them here. He showed them the way. Trotting here, there and everywhere, head high, voice loud: “Look at me! Follow me!”’

‘Ess likes attention. Obviously he shouldn’t have gone to the village when you asked him not to. But I really don’t think he’d
mean
…’

Tarik gives a small laugh. ‘I know he didn’t
mean
to do it. He just didn’t care enough to make sure he didn’t do it by accident.’

‘I don’t think that’s…’

‘Why should he? No, he should bring them. They should come, they should kill me. I should thank them, welcome them.’ He turns away from me, towards the huge blank of the night, and opens his arms. ‘Do you hear?’ he shouts. ‘I
thank
you! I
welcome
you!’

‘Tarik,’ I say, ‘I think this is enough now, don’t you?’

‘Gentlemen of the outer dark!’ he shouts. ‘Tarik Kundra
welcomes
you!’

‘Enough. Enough now.’

‘
Welcomes
you!’ For a while he stands like that, arms spread, gun dangling. Then he lets down his arms and turns to me.

On his face there is a terrible look. A look emptied out by guilt, by ravenous shame. Pared eyelids, peeled lips. Most terrible of all, his certainty that he is being watched, and at all times. Eyes in the trees, in the rocks, the clouds.

‘Hey, Tarik?’ I say, when I can say anything. ‘We should get back, don’t you think? We should get back to the others.’

Exhausted, he finally nods. We start to walk in the direction of the cabin. I keep thinking I’m going to say something else, to touch him, put an arm round his shoulders, then I remember the gun and I don’t do any of that and just keep walking.

It’s almost nine o’clock by the time we reach the circle of storage sheds and Tarik, slumped, shoulderless, trailing the gun after him now like an invisible dog pulling at its joke-shop lead, drifts across to the cabin and goes quietly in. A faint glow under nylon tells me Harry is in his camp somewhere; a yellow smear in the windscreen of the Adventurers car tells me Asha is in there somewhere. I’m wondering where Ess is when suddenly I see him, standing next to one of the sheds, his phone clamped to his face.

One minute to nine. On another plane of the world, in the Hawks Rise flat, Alice is arranging herself on the ghost couch, settling her legs, straightening her back, flicking her head from side to side to free it of the blonde visor of her hair as she switches on her laptop. The Skype software warbles and pings its circles.

As I walk towards him I can hear Ess speaking into his phone: ‘I don’t pay… no, no… I don’t
pay
… I don’t
pay
you…’ Speaking, no doubt, to Bill Fancy, the whistling detective, as he has been all along. On the pavement outside the hotel. By the road in the scooped-out wilds. Next to the storage shed at twilight.

I stop in front of him. ‘Ess,’ I say.

He ignores me.

‘Ess, we need to talk.’

He ignores me.

‘We need to talk, Ess. We need to talk right now.’ I wave both arms in his face (signalling distress from a ship at sea). He blinks at me.

‘Right now, Ess.
Right fucking now.
’ He flicks a hand at me as if I’m a fly.

I try to take the phone from him. I have no idea what I’ll do with it if I get it – crush it under my foot, hurl it across the plain, as Tarik almost did, but couldn’t quite, his gun – but I don’t get anywhere near it. He swirls violently away, still talking into his phone, now holding up the palm of a hand to me in a warding gesture. I’m not a fly any more but a bad spirit, a possession to be vanquished, exorcised.

I consider my options. I consider trying to wrestle him to the ground. Then I look at my watch and it’s two minutes past nine and I turn away from him and run across the plain to the storage shed I’ve been sleeping in and I go inside and slam the door after me.

Five past nine.

I open my tablet, open the Skype software, put a call through to Alice. Her grinning contact photo appears inside the pinging circles.

I check the wifi connection, which has been unfailingly strong and sharp, and see a blinking dot in the dead tiers of the icon. The Skype circles ping and ping. I drop to my knees in the layered stink of my sleeping bag. Ping and ping, ping and ping.

Ten past nine. Is this what dying is like – this purity of agony, this pure experience of injustice?

Then she’s there. ‘–
hell
—’

‘Alice? Is that you? Can you hear me?’

Then she’s not there. The flat surface of a black virtual cube. ‘–
ball
—’

‘Can you hear me, Alice? Can you hear me, Darling?’

‘Hello, Baldie.’

My sensation of triumph at the suddenly immaculate image of her face in the screen is at once qualified. Something is wrong, or several somethings are wrong. For one thing, she is not at home, not at the flat, not on the couch. She is outside somewhere, surrounded by the blowy ether of being outside somewhere; just past her head I can see brickwork, the frozen sickles of a bit of tree. For another thing, her face is full of a look of surly and ironic preoccupation that I’ve never seen before. Even when she’s working,
thinking
, Alice doesn’t look like this. She looks like she’s planning a boring murder – like her thoughts are all blood and death and she can barely stay awake.

‘Alice? Are you okay? Can you hear me?’

‘Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?’

‘Yeah, I can hear you…’

‘That’s good.’ An extraordinary spectacle befalls the screen. I think the image is breaking up again, then I realise she’s yawning.

‘Where are you? What’s going on?’

‘Where am I? Oh. I’m at the hospital with Daniel.’

She yawns again. I watch it – the huge expansion, the cataclysmic contortion – as every kelvin of warmth gulps purposefully out of my body.

‘What? Why?’

‘Why? Oh. He’s, you know, had another one. He’s had a stroke.’

‘What?’

‘He’s had another stroke, yeah.’ For now this is all I can notice: that she’s saying
stroke
. He’s had a stroke. Not
he’s lurched, he’s had a lurch, he’s had one of his lurches.
He’s had a stroke.

‘Oh my god, Alice…’

‘It was yesterday. Not long after we spoke. I got a call from the school. It was that one I’ve never got on with, you know, “Sierra”? She was all “We’ve had a slight setback here at school today” and I was like “What do you mean, a slight setback?” and somehow it took me ten minutes to work out that he was in the hospital. Which, as you can see, is where I am now. I think it’s a sort of smokers’ area, which is lovely when you think about it. But it’s all right. No smokers around at present.’

‘Just me,’ I say for some reason.

‘Yeah,’ she says, so banally I’m relieved by the certainty she hasn’t heard me, hasn’t taken in my idiocy, then she says, ‘Just you.’

‘How is he?’

‘Oh. Well it’s really bad. All the talk here is of “massive neural impact” and “catastrophic damage”. The nub of it is his brain’s fucked.’

I didn’t think I could be colder, but I’m colder. ‘No…’

‘Oh yeah.’ She nods with horrible earnestness. ‘Gone. He’s fucked. He’s going to die. That’s the nub of it.’

‘No, Darling…’

‘They keep telling us “he’s on the pathway”. That’s what they say now, when your brain’s fucked and you’re going to die. They say you’re “on the pathway”. And I want to tell them, “This one was always on the pathway. This little bastard was born on the pathway”. I don’t say anything, though.’

‘Alice…’ I don’t know what to say. ‘I don’t know what to say…’

‘No one does. Dad’s here, he’s up there now, staring at a bit of wall he seems to have taken a particular fancy to. Mum’s on her way, apparently. I keep getting calls about all the many interesting nuances of delay and disruption to her flights. Last I heard she was at some terminal in the Arab Emirates looking for someone to make a bullet-pointed formal complaint to. But for now it’s just Dad and me. “Sierra”, she was here before, she said she saw it
happen. She said he was sitting there, bullshitting with his mates, and then he just crumpled up. Sort of folded up in his chair. “Like something just fell on him out of the sky,” she said. And I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, “Why are you telling me this? Why would anyone want to know this?”’

‘How…’ I choke. How is it said? How does anyone say anything? ‘How long…?’

‘How long does he have? Could be any time. Tomorrow, next week. Could be right this second while I’m sitting out here in the smokers’ area, talking to you…’ She shakes her head, laughs. Not her usual laugh. A brittle click, a hack.

‘I’ll come home,’ I say.

‘What? Oh. Well, all right. Please yourself.’

‘I’ll come straight home. I can be there…’ But I don’t know when I can be there. I don’t even know where I am.

‘Yeah, all right, but don’t do anything drastic. You’re at work. If you’ve got work to do, do it. I mean, there’s no new news here. We always knew this was going to happen. He was always, as they say, on the path…’

Abruptly her voice becomes a staggered yodel; then it drains to silence. The screen jolts, fragments. A child’s red and black building blocks, spilt from the toy box. Flickery cells, chunks of dripping comb.

‘Alice?’

‘–
jug
–’

‘Darling? Alice? I’ll come home. I swear. I’ll come straight home.’

For an instant she’s there again, as if entombed in living ice. ‘–
view
–’

Then she’s not there again. Nothing is there.

‘Yes, Darling,’ I tell the blank screen. ‘And I love you. I love you too.’

I leave the storage shed and stand breathing in the dark. Then I see Ess and I start to run. I see Ess, tiny, remote, walking away onto the plain, and I run after him, shouting, calling his name, cursing his name. He’s already so far away it’s not possible that I can catch him up but I run anyway, run and run after him into the dark, the air smoothing my head, the earth thudding under my feet, until there’s only the dark and the plain and the pain in my back and the flame in my lungs and the voice inside me and all round me shouting, calling his name, cursing his name.

Morning on the plain. Gnarls of distance, fathoms of sky.

Daniel is dying. Ess is missing.

But first things first.

Harry comes out of his tent and I’m waiting for him.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ I say.

He looks tired, unprepared, but not especially startled. He nods, as if agreeing, but he’s not agreeing. ‘I beg to differ.’

‘So you’re just going to walk in there’ – Tarik’s cabin – ‘and tell him all this stuff you think you know about his wife, and a photo, and a pile of rubble in Kolkata?’

‘At lunchtime, yes. Midday. I’m just going to walk in there and tell him all that stuff.’

‘But you don’t
know
, do you? You don’t know that any of it’s
true
.’

‘I’ll take my chances.’

‘You’re going to upset people, you’re going to confuse people. And people are already pretty upset and confused.’

‘Sometimes that’s just how it is.’

‘I can’t let you do it, Harry.’

‘You know what, Steven? I don’t think you can stop me.’

He’s right. I think he’s right. Is he right?

‘Ess is missing,’ I say. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘Well then, you’d better get looking for him,’ Harry says, and with a last shallow nod lumbers away to the latrine.

Asha is sitting on the ground, drying her hair in the middle of nowhere. The longer I look at it, her position, her placement on the earth, the more disturbing it becomes. She’s not within the circle of the sheds, nor on its edge, nor especially beyond it – just
outside
of it. She must have been to the river to wash but she’s not placed on a line that comes from anywhere or leads anywhere. She’s somehow nowhere, in the middle of it, drying her hair section by section with a white towel and methodical rubs of her hands.

Creakily I walk up to her. ‘Morning,’ I say. She glances at me then glances away. But she doesn’t seem especially hostile, so I sit down on the ground next to her. Her legs are crossed so I cross my legs also. ‘I think we both got a bit frayed yesterday,’ I say.

She shrugs, fairly loosely, which I decide to take as a good sign.

I was out of order,’ I say. ‘On reflection I can see that. I was frayed, ragged at the edges… not that that’s an excuse. I was a dick.’

She glances at me again. ‘What do you want, Steven?’

She’s right, I want something. But instead of telling her what I let out a long breath and say, ‘Everything’s got pretty fucked up here, hasn’t it?’

‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know.’

‘I think we’ve all got fucked up. Ess, Harry, Tarik, me… maybe even you.’

Asha tips her head to the side and begins rubbing a section of her hair vigorously as if trying to get a tune out of it. Her lips are clamped, cusped with effort. Until you look you’ve no idea what hard work it is.

I say, ‘Ess is missing.’

She glances at me with sliding eyelids.

I say, ‘He walked off. Last night. Didn’t say where he was going or anything. He’s not been back. I’ve been looking… but there’s no sign.’

At last she stops rubbing her hair and begins scything at it with a tiny brown plastic comb. There is, I realise, no vanity in the way she does this: it is a chore, management – the management of a bodily mass. She says, ‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘No.’

‘Have you been up all night?’

‘I have, yes.’

‘You should’ve slept.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’

She laughs, sort of. ‘You look bad.’

I laugh, sort of, too. ‘Well, Asha, I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment.’ I pause. Am I going to do this? But of course I’m going to do this: ‘I talked to my girlfriend yesterday. You remember I mentioned my girlfriend?’ She looks blank. ‘Alice. She has this brother, and he’s really ill. In fact, uh, he’s going to die.’

Asha glares at me.

‘This isn’t a story or anything. My girlfriend’s brother is dying. Right at this moment. This is what’s happening.’

She glares at me. Then she looks away, scythes at her hair.

‘So, you see, I have to go home. I have to find Ess and go home.’

‘Finish your business, and go home,’ Asha grunts.

‘That’s not…’

‘I don’t know where he is, all right?’

‘No, no.’

‘Probably he went to the village.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘He’ll come back.’ She scythes at her hair. ‘Or he won’t.’

‘Asha,’ I say, ‘I really need to find him.’

‘Then find him. Go to the village.’

‘I haven’t slept…’

‘Then sleep. Sleep then go.’

‘You could help me. I was thinking… you could drive me to the village.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know… because I’m asking you?’

‘Why would I care that you’re asking me?’

‘Because you’re that kind of person. Because you’re a good person.’

‘Is this how you make people do things for you?’

‘Is this…?’

‘In your work, in your
business
. Is this what you do? Tell people sad things about a dying brother, then tell them they’re “good”, so they will do things for you?’

‘I’m not really that kind of business guy. I’m more like a secretary.’

She laughs – no doubt about it this time.

‘I’m more or less a secretary. I don’t spend my days making people do things for me. I answer the phone. I bring the coffee.’

‘You bring the driver, you bring the car.’

‘That’s not what this is. I just want to find him and get us both the hell out of here. I just want to go home, and be with my girlfriend and her brother.’ It’s true, or it’s mostly true: certainly I’m keen to find Ess and get him back here before midday, before Harry tells Tarik that his wife died a week ago in a building collapse in Kolkata.

‘So you’re finished here? No more business? No more Tarik? No more machine?’ She widens her eyes in a parody of hurt. ‘No more… India?’

‘That’s right,’ I say. And it’s true. And it’s not true at all.

Asha grabs her hair with both hands, begins pushing it back, slotting it away behind her head like the blades of a penknife, and says, ‘I’ll make you a deal.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll drive you to the village. I’ll help you find him.’

‘Okay, great.’

‘And you’ll give me half.’ She smiles wonderfully. ‘You’ll finish your business here, Mr My Girlfriend’s Brother is Dying, and you’ll give me half. Half whatever you make from this transaction, Mr I’m Just a Secretary. Half of everything you make out here. From the machine, from Tarik, from Reva. From India. You’ll give to me.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.’

‘Asha.’

‘Think it over. Take as much time as you need.’

In the car, in the blazing, bouncing light, Asha grows excited. She laughs, slaps the wheel, shouts at me over the noise of the engine. Is it the money, the thought of the money? Or is it simply that now she’s mad too – like the rest of us?

She says, ‘It disgusts you. The whole place, the whole country. India disgusts you. Let me tell you, it disgusts me too. What is India but the world’s whore, the world’s favourite foreign fuck? So exotic, so authentic, so convenient, so
easy
… A country that’s hardly a country at all. A country that will turn itself inside out just to give the world back its fantasy of limitless space, boundless possibility.’

‘That’s not what I think India is,’ I say. ‘That’s what you think India is.’

We’re still some way from the village when we see him, a stick-man isolated by empty fields and empty sky at the side of the road. Asha stops the car as soon as we see him, but I don’t care. I get out and scuttle the last few yards to Ess’s side.

From the car he resembled a short, slender tree – I made him out only because I was looking for him – but up close he blends with his surroundings much less successfully. He’s not a rooted thing, impassive, eternal; he’s a man wavering on his feet, trembling with exhaustion. Has he stood here all night? It’s possible. He looks the way he looked that Saturday morning four years ago when I woke up in hospital and found him sitting in a chair next to my bed: red eyelids, glittery cheeks, an expression of perfect serenity.

By the time I get to him, he’s already chuckling.

‘How good of you to join me, Mr Strauss! There’s no need, but I won’t pretend I don’t appreciate the gesture.’

‘Okay,’ I say, not sure how to say anything else.

‘Naturally I’d have preferred to have given you the option, join me or don’t join me, but I was myself taken unawares. Caught out by the unexpected urgency. Still, you’re here now and that’s the main thing.’ He goes to slap my shoulder, but misses it completely. His face crunches up in a difficult sort of grin. ‘I’m very glad you’re here.’

I stand nodding for a while. I should say,
We need to go.
I should say,
I don’t know about you, Ess, but I need to go. Alice’s brother is dying and I need to go home. I need to go home right now.
But instead I say, ‘You’re expecting Reva.’

‘Yes.’ His grin clicks through a couple of rotations and becomes a broad, confident one. ‘I daresay Tarik’s good lady wife will be joining us at any moment.’ He throws a salute in the direction of Asha, darkly outlined behind the windscreen of the Adventurers car, and says, ‘And you’ve brought a driver and a car, no less! Do you know I didn’t think of that? Just so caught up as I say by the quite unexpected
urgency
… I’m not sure what I would’ve done. Probably oiled a palm or two here, entailed the services of a couple of witless rustics. But you’ve spared me the trouble. How entirely marvellous.’

‘Happy to help.’ I nod and nod. ‘So what’s this “urgency”?’

‘What do you think? The call, the call. The call from Fancy Bill confirming that he and Reva are almost here.’ He opens his arms at the road and says it again: ‘Almost here.’

‘Great,’ I say weakly.

‘Not a moment too soon, if you ask me. When you think what I’m paying him… But most welcome news, just the same.’

‘So Bill said he was bringing her here? This morning? To meet you?’

‘Bringing her here, yes. To meet me, meet us all. Tarik especially, but… yes.’ He drops his head and pushes it forward – that lunge of chagrin. ‘They’re just ever so slightly on the late side. I was expecting more like last night… but this morning, yes.’

‘You’ve been waiting all night?’

‘Delays. This is life. Brief intervals between unavoidable delays. But I think this morning, yes.’

I nod and nod. Then I say, ‘I don’t think she’s coming, Ess.’

‘No?’ Calmly interested in whatever I might have to say.

‘I don’t think anyone’s coming.’

‘And why do you think that?’

‘Harry has this story, he thinks Reva’s dead, he thinks she was killed last week in a building collapse in Kolkata, so he thinks she’s dead, and he thinks you’ve been had. By Bill or whoever. He thinks maybe you’ve been had.’

Ess stands blinking at all this with perfectly calm fascination. ‘Does he really?’

‘He does. And he says he’s giving us till midday then he’s going to tell Tarik. Which, you know, I think would be bad.’

‘What do you mean, “giving us till midday”?’

‘That’s just what he said.’

‘But what does that mean, “giving us”? “Giving us” what? What’s he “giving us”?’

‘Maybe we should ask him. We should go back…’

‘Oh, no.’ His frown now curls in a way that says he will indulge an idle fancy so far but no further. ‘I can’t go back. I have to be here. To meet Reva.’

I don’t know about you, Ess…

I nod and nod. ‘I don’t think she’s coming, Ess.’

‘Bushwah. Bill called me. They’re almost here.’

Nodding, nodding. ‘I don’t think anyone’s coming.’

We’re watching the road, watching the point at which the line of the road cuts off against the line of the horizon, Ess and I standing by the road looking a point that’s not a real point at all but an accident of perspective, an effect of bodies in space, a conjuration of the eye.

I tell Ess we need to drink and eat, but he seems not to hear me, so I allow myself to drift into the village, along the deserted lanes, until at last I tumble by pure luck back into the courtyard where on our last visit we encountered Laxman and a great gathering of talkative villagers. Today it’s empty. Funny: without people in it, the courtyard seems tiny. When it was full it seemed huge. Another trick of the eye.

Eventually I find a man at a stall who agrees to sell me tea and bread. The price he asks is astonishing, a provocation, a cold penalty, but I pay it anyway and scuttle back to the road. Ess accepts the food and drink when I offer it to him but he remains incapable of, or uninterested in, communication, wholly absorbed in his observation of the road.

I take the chai and the roti to Asha, too. She accepts my offerings through a scrolled-down window. She doesn’t seem interested in talking to me either. I ask if she’s okay in the car, if she maybe wants to get out, stretch her legs or something, and she tilts her head from side to side then seals up the window.

I return to Ess at the roadside. We eat and drink in silence. Again I imagine trying to tell him about Alice, about Daniel (
I don’t know about you, Ess
…), but only the thought of it fills me with terror. I think of Alice’s face in my tablet, the huge nakedness of her yawning mouth. She is so far away, sitting on a bench outside an English hospital, her brother in a bed with his stroke-twisted body and his fucked brain, the thousands of miles of planet between us all exhausting and intricate obstacle, and every vector of it washed in my coward’s sweat and my idler’s blood… But none of this is what terrifies me. What terrifies me is the thought that I would tell him, and he would simply nod, and turn away from the road, and say of course we must go. ‘Of course, Mr Strauss. We must leave at once. Why on earth didn’t you say anything earlier?’ It feels like what he would do, sounds like what he would say. In only a very slightly different world he is saying it, he is striding away, phone clamped to his ear, already arranging flights as he waves to Asha to start the car and take us directly to the nearest airport, while I go on standing here, uncertain, immobile, no answer in me anywhere to his entirely pertinent question:
Why didn’t you say anything earlier?