Burr, burr, burr, burr, burr burr
“That’s it,” I screamed. “I’m ready to look at you now, you fucking thing. I know what you are and I’m ready to see you properly.”
It came up at me in a burst of spray–memories and regrets and wishes and sadness and happiness and dreams–the shark’s head, two black toy eyes either side of a huge grey bullet anvil jumbo jet slashed open all across into a black and red funnel full of teeth.
I know what you are.
I threw the laptop into its open red hole and tumbled backwards off the flying deck as the Ludovician crashed it into splintering wood and then–
35
Just Like Heaven
The explosion blasted a hole in the sea, the pressure forcing tons of deep water up and out into a violent high-rolling wave. It heaved me up and out with it, lurching me along and over, throwing my feet over my head and tumbling me down into the bass thunder-hum of the blue. I came up retching into a ghost world of thick mist and spray. Remains of shark and boat rained down loud and half-seen in the mist, a meteor storm of shadows. Wide-eyed and gasping, I splash-ducked as a huge chunk of splintered hull came spinning out of the white and punched down hard into the ocean behind me.
Bobbing up, coughing and spitting, I swam through waves and chop to the fallen lump of Orpheus, clambered my top half onto it and held tight as the last of the debris dropped, fell and fluttered from the sky.
The sea finally calmed itself into a traumatised rocking sway but the mist held in place above it, an entire second ocean of net curtains and spider webs, haunted and swaying and quiet. I pressed my head down against the wooden planking, shaking and cold, gulping back deep shuddery sobs. I pushed myself up a little and tried to look around, looking for Ian and his little boat, looking for anything, but I could only see maybe six feet in each direction and there was nothing else in my little patch of ocean. I was all alone in the white. I slumped back down onto the wood.
I felt something, a faint vibration like the tiniest muscle spasm in the back of my thigh. I’m injured, I thought, I’m cut open and the cold is keeping it numb and vague. I reached a hand down and around to investigate and found the postcard in the back pocket of my shorts. I touched it again and, yes, it felt like the little oblong of card was humming. I carefully pulled it out of my back pocket, resting on the bobbing wreckage with my elbows to get a better look.
By now the postcard was soggy, pulpy and coming apart at the edges, but I didn’t notice. Something amazing took up all of my attention: the little black and white picture of my house was moving.
As I stared, a tiny pixellated starling flutter-jumped and flew from the pixellated telephone line. Pixellated trees waved in a pixellated wind. A grey pixillated Volkswagen flashed across the frame, driving up the out-of-shot road.
I brought my finger up to touch the surface of the image, but there was no surface. My finger went straight through and became another moving part of the picture. I pushed my hand, my arm inside. I felt the cold rainy air, the real air on the other side of the postcard. I stared down at the picture, made my pixellated hand squeeze itself into a pixellated fist and then released it, stretching and waving my black and white fingers.
I could hear road traffic. Other sounds too–a baby crying, the sound of somebody’s TV through an open window–noises drifting in across the surface of the misty water. As I looked around, faint shadows began to appear in the white. Familiar silhouettes formed themselves around me, a skyline of terraced rooftops and trees, TV aerials and chimney pots, the telegraph pole in the garden of the house across from mine.
I pulled my arm out of the picture. The sounds quickly subsided and the shapes faded away, back into the mist.
I stared down at the postcard. Another pixellated car flashed across the frame, but silently now. I could just make out the rain, coming down heavier, lancing across the scene in little slashes of grey. I looked for a while at my black and white house.
“No,” I said to the picture, quietly, eventually. “I’m not going back, I’m never going back. One foot in front of the other, trying to be brave and trying to be strong? Coping and keeping going, why would I want that?” I felt the hot tears. “She’s dead.” My head dropped down into the crook of my elbow. “She’s dead and I’m so, so sick of surviving,” and I cried and cried and cried.
Bleak, white-washed moments passed.
And then.
A patch of warmth touched my back. I looked up. Sunrays, sunlight was cutting down through the mist and spotlighting little travelling pools of blue onto the cold ocean. I shifted myself around on the Orpheus wreckage, trying to see through the clearing mist for Ian’s little boat. I shifted again, trying to get a better view and that’s when I noticed what was happening to the postcard in my hand. The black and white picture of my house was fading away, the black receding into the white. Before long the image had gone all together, leaving the postcard completely blank. I went to touch the new surface but stopped: the little card was humming again, vibrating faintly against the tips of my finger and thumb. The hum only lasted for a moment but when it stopped the postcard seemed to have changed itself into something else, something thinner and less pulpy, something with a clean and glossy finish. As I watched, a new picture began to develop, not black and white this time, but alive with spreading reds and blues and yellows and greens. Within a few seconds I was holding, not a postcard, but an underwater photograph of a brightly coloured fish.
I stared at the picture, overwhelmed by an immense feeling of interconnectedness, a crushing weight of relevance I could feel but couldn’t quite find. Something huge happening here. Something, so, so important…
A fountain of bubbles erupted a few feet from my chunk of the Orpheus and I tried to scramble the bottom part of my body out of the water and up onto the broken hull-side.
Then Scout’s masked head broke the surface and she waved, spitting out her air valve.
“Hey,” she said, grinning.
“Jesus.” I stuffed the picture into my back pocket, laughing and sliding down the hull and into the water to meet her.
Scout laughed too, pulling off her scuba mask and swimming towards me. I grabbed her and she grabbed me and we pulled ourselves together through the water, wrapping our arms around each other, squeezing tight, holding on and laughing like crazy.
“I thought you were dead,” I said, when I finally found the breath. “Oh, God, I thought you were dead,”
“The shark put a hole in the cage,” she said. “When he got tangled up, I sort of, slipped out.”
“You sort of slipped out,” I repeated, looking at her like I couldn’t believe it, shaking my head.
We kissed then. We kissed up against the flotsam and jetsam hull, tight together as if it was the end and the beginning of the world, as if there was nothing else and never would be.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I said quietly as we broke apart.
“I can’t believe you did it,” she smiled up at me. “You did it, Eric.”
I gave a helpless sort of shrug. “I know.”
“What about the doctor?”
I shook my head.
Scout looked down at the water.
“The cage and the barrels and the shark all got tangled and he was trying to cut the lines. It all happened so fast, one minute he was–I mean, I didn’t know for a second what had happened and then–”
As I stumbled on, trying to get the words out, Scout looked deep, deep into my eyes. “It’s alright,” she said calmly, eventually, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I know you couldn’t have done anything.”
“I couldn’t reach him. I tried to get hold of him but I wasn’t fast enough and–”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“The winching arm came free so suddenly, I–”
“Eric, please.”
“What?”
“You need to really listen to me. I’m trying to tell you something important, okay?”
&n
bsp; I looked at her. She brought her hand up and laid it gently on the side of my face.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “Sometimes things go bad and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. None of what happened was your fault, Eric. I don’t blame you for it, do you understand? I don’t blame you. It was an accident.”
Everything came together then. The whispering nonsense and that huge something I hadn’t been able to find, all of it focusing into one bright, brilliant realisation.
In that one moment, I understood it all.
“Oh, God.”
Scout smiled.
“Thank you,” I said, my eyes hot and wet and stinging.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered, crying too.
“I love you. I always, always loved you. You know that, right?”
“I know that,” she said. “I enjoy spending time with you too.”
I laughed a wet laugh. “I hate that one.”
“I know,” she grinned, tear-striped. “You’re too easy.”
And we held each other tight, crying as the last of the mist cleared around us.
“Hey,” Scout patted me on the back, “is that Ian over there?”
I turned to look. Ian’s yellow dinghy bobbed in the distant swell. Miles behind him and out across the sea, the island rose up high and stony, hazy in the distance.
“Ian!” I shouted out, half to the cat and half with the joy of seeing his little boat. I waved in his direction. “I think I can see him. Can you see him?”
“Oh, yeah,” she nodded, staring out, shielding her eyes from the sun. “You’re going to be in so much trouble. Come on.”
“Scout.”
“Yeah?”
“It is over, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s over.” She looked at me. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. “I’m glad,” I said quietly. “Where do we go now?”
She pointed out towards the island.
“Yeah, but I mean what is that, what is it really?”
Scout smiled. “Home.”
Ian frowned out over the water like an old-fashioned sea captain as the two of us swam his little boat towards the distant shore.
We were about halfway there when small towns of square white buildings started to light up in the dusty evening. As night drew in, we steered the dinghy towards a stretch of friendly looking coastline, a long strip of beach where the hanging lanterns of tavernas and waterfront bars laid multicoloured stripes out across the waves.
36
Goodbye Mr Tegmark
Acknowledgments
Thanks first and foremost to my wonderful and supportive girlfriend Charlotte Bozic–you're amazing. Thanks to my great friend Maggie Hannan for absolutely everything, from Alvarez to Zest. Thanks to Toby Litt and Ali Smith for giving me a break in New Writing 13. Thanks to David Mitchell for the notes and the chocolate, to Scarlett Thomas for pointing me in the right direction and to my agent and friend Simon ‘The Shark’ Trewin for making all this happen. Thanks to Francis Bickmore, editor and partner in conceptual crime, for investing so much in Eric's world and for all the hours of discussion and un-logic testing which have made such a difference to the finished book. Thanks to Jamie Byng–a man with jet fuel and enthusiasm for blood–for his unshakable belief in conceptual fish and to Jessica Craig for making so many other people believe in them too. Big thanks to everyone else at Canongate who has made every aspect of publishing The Raw Shark Texts such a fantastic experience (I hear there are other publishing houses, but I'm not sure I believe it…). Thanks to Jane Stubbs and Arts Council England, Yorkshire and to Paul Holloway and Hull City Arts Unit for all their help, support and faith. Thanks to James Russell, Helen Tuton and Rob Davie for their initial red pen work. Thanks to Abi Walker, Lee Fenton, Colin Hurst, Stephen Walker, Helen Ridler, Nick Broughton, Matt Clarke, Rebecca Woods, Paul Hardy, Mike Galvin and everyone else (you know who you are) for the years of fun and trouble that made this book possible. Thanks to my family for being so supportive and never saying, ‘So when are you going to get a real job?’. Final thank-yous to St John Donald, Katherine Butler and Peter Czernin for their ongoing work in evolving this Ludovician's celluloid cousin.
About the Author
Steven Hall was born in Derbyshire in 1975. He studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallum University. His ‘Stories for a Phone Book’ appeared in New Writing 13 (Picador, 2005). The Raw Shark Texts is his first novel.
Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts
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