The World House (33 page)

  She has forgotten about tidying the kitchen but that's OK as she has lots of time. So, she has done crockery and cutlery, now she must do food. There is not much food but what there is is easy to make right. She looks for spaghetti as she is very hungry. There is none so she will have to stay hungry. She separates what there is into bags, packets and tins and makes neat rows of each. Some of the flour has escaped. Flour always escapes. It is like a mug of hot drink in that it always leaves a mark where it has been. Flour is horrid, horrid, horrid. She is tempted to throw the flour in the sea too but then it will make pastry and you cannot sail a boat on pastry so the strange men will be cross. She tries to make sure the packet will not leak, puts it down and then does not look at it again so that she cannot see whether it has leaked. The flour is fine. The flour will Just Have to Do.

  She finds a cloth. This is a good thing, cloths make things clean. Though first she has to make the cloth clean. She does this by soaking it in some water and some salt. She has heard that salt is a clean thing. It doesn't feel clean but they use it to store things in so it must be. And when you cut yourself even though salt stings it heals and that's why it stings. So salt is good. She uses the cloth to make everything else clean. It takes a long time but once it is done it is good.

  All of this has taken a long time and when she goes back up to the deck it is starting to get dark. The strange men are all running around as something very important is going to happen. Alan tells her again that when it gets dark the sea turns into men and the men attack the ship. This is silly and she doesn't want to see it. Water and men are very different. She hopes Alan hasn't become too strange by being with the other strange men. She decides the easiest thing is to stay below deck and ignore all the noise and the shouting. If she does this then she does not have to understand about men made from water as she hasn't seen them and things are only completely real once they have been seen. The noise lasts for twelve minutes, she counts them, this gives her something to do that isn't worrying. Twelve is also a good number. This is good.

  Everyone comes down and they go in the kitchen and make it messy again. This makes her a bit angry but the nice woman says she has done a good job so that is good. She supposes she can always make the kitchen right again tomorrow.

  She is tired and the conversation between the crew isn't something she needs to understand so she goes to bed to sleep.

  It has not been a Really Good Day but at least nobody has tried to hurt her so it was better than some of the Really Bad Days she's had lately.

 

Alan didn't sleep well. But then he rarely did. His dreams were of the sort that left you too agitated for sleep. From typical anxiety dreams – answering a phone that he cannot find, typing on a typewriter whose alphabet is unknown by anything but itself – to mini-dramas that centred around the early life he couldn't remember. Rebecca, his therapist, was all too quick to dismiss this as his subconscious trying to fill the gap in his memory. Perhaps so, but he wished it would do it with a little less cruelty. He imagines himself as a young man, savouring the discomfort of others. A dream in which he rapes a young woman is particularly intolerable (and regular enough to partly explain his lack of interest in relationships). Then there are his dreams of the box. In his nightmares the box has always been a part of his life, though clearly this is not the case: this is a prime example of "retrospective editing" – only a therapist could come up with a phrase so unwieldy – in that the things that are important to him are now inveigling their way into his fantasies of the past. He doesn't much care what they are; he doesn't like them and would gladly consign them to the same fate as his history.

  He awoke with the shocked conviction that he had just shot someone – how ludicrous, he's never even handled a gun, let alone fired one, yet he seemed to recall the recoil of the revolver, the spray of precious blood from an exit wound. The blood was as red as the woman's hair, both flying free in the air around her shocked face. Rebecca insists that this is his mind's inclination to fear the unknown. With less respect than he suspects he should owe, Alan always thinks – but never says – that Rebecca is full of shit. She likes the sound of her own voice more than she does his, and for a listener this is never a good sign. One day he'll cancel his meetings with her, one day…

  He sat up in bed, not even tempted to try and drop off again just yet. Let a few minutes pass in the darkness. It's time for his brain to occupy itself with fresh thoughts, to dismiss the image of the gunshot wound in a woman's head, unfurled like a Valentine rose. Let him, instead, think about the here and now. About how he and Sophie might find their way home.

  "Hmm… tell me about Sophie." Rebecca was seated in the corner of his room. Not really, of course, that would be lunacy rather than imagination – but he had pictured her strongly in his mind and now she was here. As always she was asking questions.

  "Nothing to tell," he whispered, feeling foolish to have given the fantasy weight by speaking to it.

  "This constant fear that you're not a good man," she said, "this conviction that – despite the opinion of your peers – you are in some way an unpleasant individual, unworthy of respect, friendship or love. You wouldn't be trying to assuage it, would you? The kindly father to a special-needs child… you couldn't get more worthy could you?"

  He ignored her this time. He wouldn't validate that opinion with an answer, however close it might be to the truth.

  "Who couldn't respect such a man?" she continued. "What a good, kind, wholesome man. What a
worthy
man."

  He stared at her, if only to make her vanish. Fantasies never bear up to scrutiny, not in the waking hours.

  Now he had the room to himself he got out of bed and walked over to the window. He'd forgotten that there was nothing to be seen, no light to illuminate the water they sailed on. He rested his head on the sill, desperately tired and yet determined to stay awake long enough to wipe his brain clean of the dream that woke him. What to do? That was still the only pertinent question. He had surprised himself by enjoying the day spent playing a sailor, everything driven by simple reasons and purpose. There was much to be said for it. Now he was worried that it wasn't getting them anywhere, it was just a way of filling his time. They needed to find a way home but, adrift on this unreliable water, how exactly were they supposed to go about it? They couldn't navigate, all they could do was fight against the whims of the water and hope they stumbled upon something. How long might that take? Years?

  Something had just occurred to him in his thoughts. He was brushing against a realisation of importance but was unable to pin it down. A phrase suddenly occurred to him and with that, all hope of sleep was lost…

 

"The water
knows
." Alan paced the deck, shaking with the weight of this thought.

  Hawkins watched him, trying but failing to share in Alan's excitement. "The water knows what?"

  "The water knows the exit!" It was all Alan could do not to shout it. "The sea is sentient, right? It has a consciousness? A sense of its own self?"

  Hawkins nodded. "It seems so, yes."

  "Then it knows everything about its environment! What sails on it, swims in it, what shores it touches."

  Hawkins began to follow. "It is aware of everything around it, yes, I see that… if it can feel us it must feel everything."

  "Precisely! So, on the understanding that there is a route through the water, the sea knows it."

  "How does this help us?"

  "I was in the water for a few hours and it was a part of me, I shared my thoughts with it, nearly became part of it. In a subconscious sense I communicated with it."

  "Enough to know the way?"

  "No, because I didn't ask the question."

  "You're losing me…"

  "I need to become part of the water again…" Alan held up his hand, aware that Hawkins was about to protest. "Not for long, just enough to try and ask the question."

  "To ask where the exit is?"

  "Yes!"

  "Have you any idea how mad that sounds?"

  "Of course I do! But I also know that we're unlikely to get anywhere just drifting around. This is a part of the house that we can talk to, however dangerous it may be. How can we not try it?"

  Hawkins fell silent. He moved to the bow of the ship and looked out at the wall of the bathroom they had anchored themselves alongside. The checkered pattern of its black and white tiles was like a vertical chessboard, stretching as far as the eye could see. "There may be no exit," he said.

  "No, there may not, but there's no harm in hoping, is there? And with the whole crew on hand to fish me out should things go wrong…"

  "I don't like it."

  "You think I do? But having thought about it I need to try it. What if it works? There's a possibility, and there's so few of those here that I can't ignore one, however much I might wish to." Alan put his hands on Hawkins' shoulders. "Don't worry," he said. "We'll be as careful as possible."

  Hawkins nodded. Every sailor knows that sometimes careful just isn't enough.

 

They lowered him into the water in a net, the better to fish him back out again at the first sign of trouble. He poked his wrists and ankles through the mesh, coiled the rope around him and did his best to relax as he touched the sea's surface. A few years ago he had broken his arm, slipping on the ice outside the faculty building and earning a swan-neck fracture – and no few laughs from the gathered students. Later, at the hospital, he had laid back in the operating theatre, a cannula inserted into the back of his hand, and immersed himself in the sensation of the anaesthetic. The hot surge crept up his arm, riding the vein to the heart, knocking him out by the time he had felt it reach the top of his bicep. This was like that, a thick, liquid sleep that folded itself over him and rendered him as limp as a corpse. He closed his eyes, took a breath and dipped his head back into the water, offering himself to it.

  He did his best to push away physical sensations. He remembered how it had felt to be part of the water, dissolving into it, evaporating until every ebb and flow was a muscular twitch, a sensation he was part of rather than just subject to. The water was happy to receive him, buzzing effervescently over his scalp, stroking and massaging him.

  "This, of course, is a perfect example of a death wish." He opened his eyes to the voice, not in the least surprised to see Rebecca sitting cross-legged on her office chair on the sea bed. The water splayed her long hair around her head like a cartoon electric shock, and her blouse rippled with the investigation of fish as they explored cotton coral, tasting this new part of their landscape. "If you could only die in this brave attempt to save them all, what a glorious martyr, what a hero…" She spoke in air bubbles, the words popping out like marbles from between her lips.

  "I'm beginning to think I pay you too much," Alan replied. "All you ever do is patronise me."

  "But I'm the closest you come to a real relationship," she said, uncrossing her legs to let a small eel escape from the dark cave offered by her pencil skirt, "and you find me far too attractive to let me go."

  "There is that," Alan admitted, "though I would never admit it to your face."

  "Which just goes to show how unproductive our professional relationship is. What are you searching for?"

  "Escape."

  "Aren't we all?"

  "Are you my subconscious or are you part of the sea?"

  "Soon there'll be no difference."

  "Are you here to help me or distract me?"

  "I always want to help you."

  "So how do we leave here?"

  "I can't tell you, that's not how therapy works – you have to find your own answers."

  "Some help you are."

  "Let go of all of it, your fears, your perceptions, your flesh…" She arched her head back in the water, a small crab scuttling across her cheek and tapping her eye with its claw. "Go with the flow."

  "I didn't hold with that in the Sixties, let alone now."

  "The Sixties? I was under the impression you didn't remember them."

  "I don't, I was being glib."

  "And yet, when you dream of your life before it's not the Sixties you remember, is it? It's much earlier…"

  "They're just dreams."

  "You would love to believe that."

  "It's what you've always said."

  "Ah… but here I know better. How can you have memories of a time before you were born, Alan? How can that be possible?"

  "It isn't. I'm just fantasising, imagining… That's not me I see when I close my eyes, it's the man I'm afraid of being."

  "And you do right to be afraid, don't you? He's a terrible man, isn't he, Alan? A cruel and selfish man."

  "It's not me."

  "Of course it is. He's the man you were born to be before you locked him away in a box, in a house, and refused to let him back out."

  "It's not me."

  "You said you wanted escape, so… escape!"

  "It's not me." Alan could say no more; he refused to go along with the this line of conversation. She reached down beside her in the chair and pulled out an old leatherbound book. She held it up so he could see his name on the front cover. "Your notes?" he asked.

  "Not mine, I don't keep such a full account as this." She opened the book and showed him the torn first section. "Though I'm afraid it hasn't been well preserved, as you can see: whole years are chewed away. Is it any wonder you can't remember? It doesn't become really legible until you find yourself waking up alongside a country road in 1976. Before that it's just fragments, the odd word here and there, the odd image… not that there's anything wrong with a bit of mystery. Who wants to know everything in life? Where would be the fun in that?"