I checked through the inside pockets of my drenched coat. It was worse than I’d thought–the letters were all ruined.
Every pocket offered up an elastic band-bound handful of lumpy pulp, each one on the verge of coming apart like dough and shot through with black spots of print, blue ink veins. I’d not been in the downpour very long, but with that volume of water it had obviously been long enough. Too, too long. My outer camouflage, my conceptual flak jacket was useless.
Shit. No, not critical, but I’d be flying on three engines until the letters were replaced. Still, it wasn’t like I didn’t have other tools, other defences; my assumed identity was still rock solid. I’d proved that to myself again in the lobby only fifteen minutes earlier. A real job of work. But losing the letters did mean tightroping without a safety net, swimming without armbands. And I was tired. Taking no chances, I started to set up the Dictaphones.
The little tape players tinny-chattered away to themselves in the corners of the room, at the edges of my thoughts. As I stripped off the wet clothes, I let the essence of Mark Richardson slip off my face and out of my body with a series of deep, purging breaths. I allowed my movements to become blank and then slowly to change, my hands and arms and shoulders finding their old state and stretch and rhythm. I pulled my face around its natural expressions in the mirror for a while before dropping backwards onto the bed.
Aunty Ruth had lost her chef because of the floods but would be making a cold buffet for all you flotsam and jetsam in the hotel bar in a couple of hours. I set the alarm on my new mobile phone, grabbed a handful of blanket, rolled and curled.
The Dictaphones talked treble and hiss.
I reached out, grabbed the rucksack and pulled a battered plastic-wrapped bundle of papers and videotape from deep inside. The Light Bulb Fragment, still dry and undamaged. I’d been working to decode the second half for almost seven months now, at first in the house as I’d worked to perfect the Mark Richardson personality and then on the road, in blank, neat hotel rooms in friendless cities all across the country. A few more nights with the stark flashing tape and the first Eric Sanderson’s tables and charts and I might have a workable draft. There was no way to know for sure, the obscure QWERTY encoding meant you didn’t have anything until you had it all.
I rewrapped the bundle and pushed it back into the bag. In one hundred and nine minute’s time Aunty Ruth would be laying out her sandwiches. I closed my eyes, reminding myself to bring back something with meat for Ian.
Flotsam and Jetsam is what Aunty Ruth had called those of us who’d washed up in the floods that evening, and we were. Storm refugees. It would be wrong to say the hotel bar was crammed with us, but I’d bet it hadn’t been so full for a long time.
Ruth laid on three platters of sandwiches and gave me a small bag of sliced ham for the cat. She said she’d put her husband to work on getting together a makeshift sandbox, so Ian wouldn’t have any little accidents.
“Cats get so embarrassed, I know,” she said.
I circulated just like Mark Richardson would and I coughed up a couple of his obvious jokes around the bar. It had been eighteen weeks since I’d seen the real Richardson, since I finished the training, left my job, loaded the yellow Jeep and set out on the cold trail of my lost past. Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, six weeks in each city. A total of one year and four months since the day I was born, face down on that bedroom carpet.
It was still raining outside. A dramatic wet sheet broke against the window followed by a haiku of fat rain taps as the wind took a breath. Orchestral for storm.
“You see,” the man opposite me was saying. “It’s the Pennines–”
I looked up.
Mark Richardson was a people person, a listener as much as a talker. That’s what made him such a good choice for my fake identity. Meeting people, communication, information gathering, all these things would have to be done in character if my defences were going to hold. If I was going to move through the world without creating ripples and being found and ripped all apart. But being Richardson meant being Richardson all the time, not just when it suited me. And so I was socialising.
Opposite, my new flotsam friend chewed out the middle of another ham and mustard sandwich triangle, free hand circling in that way that means hold on: swallowing then speaking.
He gulped.
“It’s the Pennines,” he said again. “The hills are too high. The sky’s too low.”
I nodded.
“It grinds people up. Between the road and the sky.” He picked inside the sandwich crust before looking back at me. “Lots of accidents up there.”
This was Dean Rush, truck driver. He’d had to leave his truck–he called it a ‘unit’–further down the hill, near a golf course. I’d invited him to join me at the table and that was the first thing he’d told me. Then–the Pennines. This was a man of scraps and fragments. No links or rhythms to his conversation, everything lonely and spare. There was something birdlike about him too, I’d decided; Bleak Dean Rush, the moorland crow.
He pulled a thin white string of ham fat from the remains of his sandwich, looked carefully at it, dangling, before laying it down on the side of his plate. He blinked once, twice.
At the far end of the bar, Aunty Ruth moved all surviving sandwiches onto a single platter then set about clearing the empties. Rush watched her manoeuvre her wheelchair out of the bar then turned back to me.
“Lots of smashed-up people because of those hills,” he said.
Blink. Blink.
It was down to me to bridge the meaning gap and it took a second.
“You know them then? Ruth and–”
“John. Yeah,” he nodded. “Car crash three years ago. They didn’t think she’d survive the night.”
A few days before I set out on this quest I bought a mobile phone. I rigged up a system which would feed incoming calls through a post-buried diverter in the locked room for safety, then I made myself a small stack of business cards. They had I need to speak to you written on them and my phone number. I’d pushed the cards under AUTHORISED PERSONNEL doorways in the back alleys of crumbling docklands in Hull and grease-smeared transport depots in Sheffield. I’d left them in all the grey breezeblock STAFF ONLY and MAINTENANCE corridors which riddle the backstages of big shopping complexes and superstores across the north of England. Any place I came across that could possibly be described as un-space, I left a card. The Un-Space Exploration Committee, whoever they were, had helped the First Eric Sanderson on his journey. Maybe someone there would be able to help me track down Trey Fidorous. That was my plan, my hope. Only, the mobile phone never rang.
After so many weeks of leaving the cards and hearing nothing, I’d found myself starting to worry that the whole idea of un-space and its committee was just a jumbled delusion created by the first Eric’s collapsing mind. The line between chasing ghosts and tilting at windmills was faint and thin and blurred to the point of almost not being a line at all. Maybe this was a condition. Perhaps I was suffering from Randle’s fugue and I should turn around, go home and confess everything to her or to a proper medical doctor in a hospital who could finally make sense of all this. But. But the Ludovician was real, I’d seen it. I had seen it. And I kept coming back to the First Eric Sanderson’s words. Please don’t lose faith in me, Eric. I told myself that I wouldn’t and I couldn’t, for my sake as much as for his.
Bleak Dean Rush got up from my table, drained his beer, nodded to me, blinked and was gone. I sat there on my own for a while, spinning my bottle of beer on its mat and looking at the left-behind plate of sandwich crust Vs and discarded strings of fat.
11
Time’s Shrinking Little Antarctica
“Are you and the cat running a mobile library, love?” Three-quarters of Aunty Ruth’s head smiled over the check-in desk. I stopped at the foot of the stairs.
“Well, the mobile part might be a problem.”
She laughed. “I could always try calling someone else if you like, or
I could get John to have a look at it. Mind you, he doesn’t know half what he thinks he does and what he does know usually makes things worse.”
“Don’t worry, it’s fine. It’ll be nice to be off the road for a few days, to be honest. Ian says thank you for the ham.”
“He’s welcome. You’re right to give yourself a rest after what you went through getting here.”
I’d been unloading boxes of books from the back of the yellow Jeep and thinking about potential and momentum. The yellow Jeep was dead. The storm found its way into the engine and turned something important and dry into something broken and wet during the night. Aunty Ruth called a local garage but flooding had left the whole town full of tipped, beached and silted cars.
“They said it’ll be at least twenty-four hours, love. Maybe a couple of days before they can send someone out.”
I could have tried a less local garage. Phoned back across the moors to Sheffield maybe, but I didn’t. I told myself a few days’ wait here at the Willows Hotel could be productive. One big push might finally decode the rest of The Light Bulb Fragment. I also needed to collect a new set of letters to replace those ruined in the downpour the previous night. There was no reason not to do both here and now before heading out into Manchester; it would be hard to imagine how Fidorous’s trail could get any colder.
I convinced myself to stay on at the Willows Hotel with these clean practical facts, but there were other murkier reasons hiding in there too. I’d come three-quarters of the way along the path the first Eric had followed and I’d uncovered so very little–at best, unexplainable splinters and chips from a long lost yellow brick road; at worst, nothing at all. Soon the Light Bulb text would be decoded and not too long after that I’d reach Blackpool and the end of Fidorous’s old cold trail. The thought disturbed me. While there was still distance to travel, there was still the slim chance of finding answers. While there was still a journey to be made, my crumbly little self could exist in the potential of making it. But what when the road came to an end? What would I be then?
Ian ignored all the coming and going with boxes, staring out of the window at the trees or at the birds in them. I found myself wondering what happened to the other cat, Gavin. In The Light Bulb Fragment Eric and Clio said they’d bought two kittens before they went away to Greece, but perhaps all of that was just another routine, a joke they liked to play on strangers in campsite bars. I wondered what sequences of events had made Ian a real cat and left Gavin existing only in words, in the text of a memory. Maybe it’s natural for questions to outlive their answers. Or maybe answers don’t die but are just lost more easily, being so small and specific, like a coin dropped from the deck of a ship and into the big deep sea.
I finally closed the book of codes and charts around four o’clock the following morning. I’d been decoding and deciphering the Light Bulb text for almost thirteen hours straight, carefully chiselling out each letter from the sediment; verifying, classifying, contextualising, bringing old buried things back up into the world.
I hadn’t planned to attack The Light Bulb Fragment like this. After unloading the boxes I had a lunchtime sandwich and beer in the bar then I’d gone for a walk up the lane outside the hotel, following its winding way up the hillside. I found a bench by a lay-by and decided to sit down.
Blocky sandstone houses and mills made a town down in the valley. I saw the road I’d accidentally taken the night before and the battered park where the living brown river escaped its banks. The flashing lights of JCBs and council vehicles search-swiped through the black trees there now. Other strobing yellows blinked across the town too–recovery trucks collecting the dead cars, road cleaners, emergency street repairs. It looked as if the whole place was being dismantled to be taken somewhere else.
Beyond the town, the grey spread-planes of Manchester.
It started to drizzle. My coat was still wet from the downpour the previous night but I’d worn it anyway. I huddled down, pushed my head deep into the hood and slid my hands up the sleeves. Nothing is ever still, said the wind’s spittley breath over me, there’s no hiding from that.
I think there’s still a small block of original quiet that exists in the world. 3 a.m. to 5 a.m.–a last natural wilderness, time’s shrinking little Antarctica. In the heart of this remote and silent time-place, I finally closed my book of notes and decoding tables. I’d finished. I flipped through the completed text of The Light Bulb Fragment one more time and closed the notebook. I paced around the room for a few minutes without really seeing or looking, all heavy and sleep-staring. There were things in the text I hadn’t been expecting. Uncomfortable, complicating passages.
I checked my watch. I could afford half an hour’s sleep before the next task on my agenda if I wanted to take it, but I didn’t. The night’s decoding had left me feeling cold and hollow. I wanted to focus on other things, to do things, not lie still and quiet in a room without distractions. I packed away The Light Bulb Fragment and my translating book and dug out a smaller reporter’s notepad and pair of binoculars from the backpack’s left pocket.
My coat was finally dry and warm from half a day over the radiator (the radiators were on constantly at the Willows Hotel, a preference shared by Aunty Ruth and Ian). My room key came with a front door key because reception went unmanned after ten o’clock and this meant I could come and go whenever I chose, which was useful for the kind of early morning surveillance necessary to collect a new supply of post. I already knew where I could get a good view of the town.
I dropped the notebook, binoculars and my mobile phone into my big empty coat pockets and took my supper tray–‘I guessed you’d lost track of time, love, so I brought you something up’–down to reception. I let myself out of the building as quietly as I could.
Pulling my coat tight against the surprise of the wind I set off up the dark lane towards the bench. To take my mind away from The Light Bulb Fragment, I started to work through the First Eric Sanderson’s various systems for acquiring other people’s post.
I never got to put any of those systems into action.
It all became academic as soon as I reached the lay-by that morning. Something was waiting for me on the bench, something that changed everything. A thick padded envelope with the words THIS IS FOR YOU written across the front.
The walk back to the hotel was ten minutes of wind, trees, the sound of my heels on the tarmac road and then, suddenly, a sharp electronic note. I tripped a step, juddering the tip of my shoe against the tarmac lane and thinking for a shocked beat that the parcel under my arm was making the noise, but then knowing–almost instantly and with voltage surprise rising up into my skull–what was really happening. I pulled the mobile phone out of my coat pocket and squinted at the bright green display:
>
Answer?
12
The Light Bulb Fragment (Part Two)
Clio slid her finger and thumb around the stem of her Amstel glass.
“The question,” she said, “is why would you not want a hammock?”
“Well–”
“Oh–my–God,” she cut in with her best Sex and the City. “You are so last-century, Eric. Have you ever actually been in a hammock?”
“No.”
“You see?” she said. “You see?” Her face almost straight, Clio managed to give me a what the hell do you think is so funny stare. “Never been in a hammock. My God, Eric. I’m sorry to say this, I really am, but that is so you. You’re–” a tiny pause “–unseasoned.”
“Unseasoned?”
“Yes, darling. Unseasoned by the life-affirming spice of experience.”
I laughed out loud. “Fuck off.”
“Oh,” she said, as though my swearing were some big moment of intimate realisation. She looked me in the eyes. “Are you angry, Eric? Are you afraid?”
“Am I afraid of hammocks?”
She patted my hand. “It’s okay to cry.”
Something Clio likes to do is want things and th
en work out complicated ways of getting them. This is in spite of the fact that most of the things Clio wants she could actually afford fairly easily because she makes nearly half again as much money as I do. Or, that’s how it was until recently. We’ve been living together for about eighteen months now and we’ve moved into the final stages of money commitment. My cash and Clio’s cash has collectively become ‘our cash’. This is a lovely and nice thing for all kinds of reasons, and it also means Clio can come up with new complex strategies to persuade me to let her use ‘our cash’ to buy things. Even though I would, of course, never try to stop her buying anything.
I took a swig from my bottle. “I’m trying to work out why you want me to have a hammock.”
“Because I love you and don’t want you to miss out.”
“And?”
“We can string it between the trees outside the tent and you can lie in it and read books.”
“And?”
Clio shrugged. “And I can lie in it and read Fight Club?”
I smiled. “Okay, then. Let’s get a hammock.”
“Cool.”
“But how about we get it for both of us? Like a joint treat. To share.”
“Oh.”
“Unless,” I said, patting her hand the same way she’d patted mine, “unless you want me to buy a hammock as a treat just for myself because maybe you secretly want to buy a treat just for yourself and once I’ve got the hammock you can say ‘but I’d really like this and you did buy yourself that lovely hammock yesterday mer mer mer’.”
“Spoilsport,” Clio said, switching gears to wounded five-year-old. “Why don’t you love me anymore?”
“Because you’re an evil genius.”
She grinned. “I am, aren’t I?”