Empty Space

SIXTEEN Carshalton Shangri-La

‘I’m having some strange dreams,’ Anna Waterman said, a few days after her brush with dogs. She had arrived late for Dr Alpert due to a missed connection, but seemed pleased with herself. She sat down immediately and without any indication that she was changing the subject, went on: ‘Do you know where I’d live, if I had the chance?’

‘I don’t know. Where?’

‘I’d live in the covered bridge that goes over the platforms at Clapham station.’

‘Mightn’t it be a bit draughty?’

‘I’d keep it as one big space. Every so often you’d come upon a bit of carpet, some chairs, a bed. My furniture! I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she decided, the way you might say: ‘I’d encourage birds to visit the garden.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Just for the company. But Clapham would no longer be a stop. People would have to understand that.’ She smiled and sat back expansively in her chair, her body language that of someone who, having made a very fair offer, expects a positive response.

Helen Alpert smiled too. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you were happy with your own house now?’

Anna nodded. ‘Less unhappy,’ she agreed.

The doctor made a note. ‘And Marnie?’ she enquired. ‘How are you getting on with Marnie?’

Around the bathroom issue, and the deeper issues represented by it, Marnie and Anna had developed a kind of considerate wariness. Marnie had phoned the next day, anxious to apologise. In return, Anna sent a card, a kingfisher bursting out of the water with a small silver fish in its beak. Next time she arrived, Marnie brought flowers, a thick bunch of white stocks, blue delphiniums and sunflowers which they made into an arrangement together. One of the sunflowers was left over so Anna put it in a jug in the new bathroom. Every time she went to the loo she felt light and warmth pouring from it, and found herself full of the slow, lazy happiness she had been used to as a child, before things went wrong. The problem with Marnie, Anna had begun to suspect, was that for her nothing had ever really gone wrong.

‘I’m not sure Marnie is as grown up as she thinks she is.’

The doctor left a pause in case Anna wanted to develop this insight, then when nothing further emerged, enquired:

‘And the dreams?’

‘The dreams are a nightmare.’

In the last few days she had seen everything. Half the time she hadn’t even been sure she was asleep. In the dream she could be most certain of — the one in which she was most clearly dreaming — she was up on the Downs again, viewing herself from outside and slightly above: a woman carrying a child’s empty coat across her arms as if it were the child itself. This woman was bent forward from the waist, looking into the middle distance at the white chalk paths, then down again at the coat. Her expression was one of neither joy nor musing. Skylarks sang. Hawthorn trees clustered on the hillside below. People appeared and disappeared on long, rising horizons. There were tiny blue flowers in the turf. Quite slowly, she passed out of the picture, vanishing over one of the immense skylines of the Downs.

Carrying a child: perhaps it was a dream about Marnie, perhaps it wasn’t. If, in the doctor’s consulting room, you acknowledged a dream like that, what might you be admitting to? You couldn’t be sure. Anna therefore kept it to herself. But it was always possible to be frank about her standard dream:

The unknown woman lay on the black marble floor in some vast echoing space, dressed in a Givenchy gown; someone very old, unchanging but not yet herself; someone, essentially, waiting to change. Sometimes there was a kind of leaden buzzing noise, less a noise in fact than something that had seeped into you as you dreamed. Or you might hear a kind of high, distant ringing inside the floor, a kind of tinnitus at the heart of things. Sometimes there was the sense of an audience: someone — it might be you, it might be not — had started to clean her teeth then cut her wrists in a hotel bathroom, only then looking up to find tiers of fully-booked seats stretching up into darkness like a university lecture theatre. These were deranged but self-limiting images you could throw all day like sticks for Helen Alpert to chase — both doctor and patient got plenty of exercise out of that. So today Anna began refabricating a version of the dream she had once had while Michael was still alive, in which the first false-colour imagery of the Kefahuchi Tract — a new astronomical discovery for a brand new Millennium — had seemed to detach itself from the television screen and drift up into the dark air of their Boston motel room, where it hung like jewellery in a cheap illusion then slowly faded away. By that time the room was vast.

‘So exciting!’ exclaimed Dr Alpert. As a child — eight years old and full of joy — she had loved those pictures so much that she remembered even now the lumbering black cathode-ray TV on which she had first seen them. They were less pictures than promises about the nature of the world, the rewards of study.

Anna — who, to the extent that she could remember the event at all, remembered it differently — could only shrug.

To the postmodern cosmologists of Michael Kearney’s generation, entrapped by self-referential mathematical games, habitually mistaking speculation for science, the Tract had presented as the first of a new class of conundrums: the so-called Penfold Object, the singularity without an event horizon. To Kearney himself it was just another artefact of the 24-hour news cycle, data massaged into fantasies for media consumption, less science than the public relations of science. The day NASA/ESA revealed its Tract composites — great hanging towers like black smokers in an ocean trench, luminous rose-coloured fans and pockets of gas, shock- fronts with an aluminium sheen, looping through the gaseous medium as sounds 50 or 60 octaves below middle C, all layered-up from a year’s observations by half a dozen space-based instruments, not one of them operating in the wavelengths of visible light — he had stiffened like a cat which thinks it sees something through a window; then relaxed equally suddenly and murmured, ‘Never fall for your own publicity’; later adding with a grin, ‘They might as well have had it announced by a man in a cloak and a top hat.’

A generation later in Dr Alpert’s office, Anna asked herself out loud, as if the two ideas were related, ‘What are dreams anyway?’

What indeed? thought the doctor, after Anna had gone. Sometimes the client beggared belief. Helen Alpert studied her notes; laughed; switched the voice recorder to Play, so that she could listen for a sentence or two which had intrigued her.

The client, meanwhile, her mood still elevated, loitered a moment or two on the consulting-room steps, watching the tide sidle upriver like a long brown dog; then, with the whole afternoon in front of her, made her way by two buses and a train to Carshalton. September, the greenhouse month, wrapped discoloured, vaporous distances around Streatham Vale and Norbury, where silvery showers of rain — falling without warning out of a cloudless blue-brown haze — evaporated from the hot pavements as quickly as they fell. Nothing relieved the humidity. At the other end, Carshalton dreamed supine under its blanket of afternoon heat as Anna made her way cautiously back to the house on The Oaks, approaching this time from the direction of Banstead, crossing the Common on foot — past the prison compounds which lay as innocuous as gated housing in the woods — and entering the maze of long suburban streets at a point halfway between the hospital and the cemetery. 121, The Oaks remained empty, with no sign of the boy who had disturbed her on her previous visit. When she tried the back door it proved to be unfastened as well as unlocked, opening to a push. Inside, economics — as invisible as a poltergeist, a force without apparent agency — was dividing the place up into single rooms. Evidence of its recent activity was easy to come by: stairs and hallways smelling of water-based emulsion and new wood. Bare floors scabbed with spilt filler, power cables lying patiently in the broad fans of dust they had scraped across the parquet, ladders and paint cans that had changed places.

Anna wandered around picking things up and putting them down again, until she came to rest in what had been a large back bedroom, split by means of a plaster partition carefully jigsawed at one end to follow the inner contour of the bay window. In this way, the invisible hand generously accorded its potential tenants half the view of the garden — flowerbeds overgrown with monbretia and ground-ivy, rotting old fruit nets on gooseberry bushes, a burnt lawn across which the damp, caramel-coloured pages of a paperback book had been strewn. Anna blinked in the incoming light, touched the unpainted partition, drew her fingers along the windowsill. Sharp granular dust; builders’ dust. Nothing can hurt in these unfinished spaces. Life suspends itself. After a minute or two, an animal — a dog, thin and whippy-looking, brindled grey, with patches of long wiry hair around its muzzle and lower legs — pushed its way through the hedge from the next garden and went sniffing intently along the edge of the lawn, pausing to scrape at the earth suddenly with its front paws. Anna rapped her knuckles on the window. Something about the dog confused her. Rain poured down suddenly through the sunshine, the discarded pages sagged visibly under the onslaught as if made of a paper so cheap it would melt on contact with water. Anna rapped on the window again. At this the dog winced, stared back vaguely over its shoulder into the empty air. It shook itself vigorously — prismatic drops flew up — and ran off. The rain thickened and then tapered away and passed.

Out on the lawn, humidity wrapped about her face like a wet bag, Anna collected up as much of the book as she could and leafed through it. It was the novel the boy had recommended to her, Lost Horizon, ripped apart, perhaps, because it had finally failed to deliver on its promises of the world hidden inside our own. None of the pages were consecutive. Anna could assemble only the barest idea of the story. A crashed nuclear bomber pilot, perhaps American, finds himself in a secret country, only to have it — and his heart’s desire — snatched away from him at the last; paradoxically, that very loss seems to endorse the reader’s hope that such a country might exist. The front cover had been torn down the middle in a kind of careful rage. Anna read: ‘The classic tale of Shangri-La’. A telephone, its ringer set to simulate an old-fashioned electric bell, started up inside the house.

Aluminium foil — as brown and sticky-looking as if it had been used to cook a roast — clung in ragged strips to the inside of the nearest window. Peering anxiously between them, Anna made out the dining room. No improvements were ongoing there; nor was there much furniture or ornament. Two upright chairs. A gateleg table fifty years old. Green linoleum caught the dim light in ripples. On the table stood a pressed-tin box with a glass front, about eight inches by four, someone’s small prize brought back from Mexico during the cheap air-travel decades, in which was displayed the following peculiar diorama: an object the size and shape of a child’s skull, nestled on a bed of red lace like offcuts from cheap lingerie and set against a black background (scattered with sequins and meant, perhaps, to represent Night). Otherwise nothing, except the rolled-up carpet propped in the corner opposite the door. Though the telephone seemed close, Anna couldn’t see it. It continued to ring for a minute or two. Then came a loud, amplified click succeeded by the impure electronic silence of the open connection, and a clear voice that said:

‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’

At that the connection broke. A dark figure appeared in the internal doorway, and after two or three quietly bad-tempered attempts a wheelchair was pushed into the room. Its occupant had deteriorated since Anna last saw him getting into a cab in front of Carshalton station. One corner of his mouth was drawn up rigidly; his bald head, exhibiting the deep uniform tan of ten days on some abandoned Almerian beach, shone with ulcers. He entered sitting upright in the chair — ankles crossed and knees apart, one hand performing an unwittingly hieratic gesture at the level of his chest — but fell forward almost immediately against its restraining harness of broad nylon webbing. His head dropped slackly to the right — this brought into sharp relief the tendon at the side of his neck, and offered his left ear to the white cat on his shoulder, which, as if it had been waiting for just such an opportunity, adjusted its balance; purred; licked inside the ear with precise delicate motions. All the time Anna had been in the house, he had been there too, slumped in some other empty room, his liver-coloured underlip drooping and one blue eye open in the heat. The harness, with its central quick-release mechanism, looked too robust for any forces the movement of a wheelchair might produce; while the seat itself had bulky, over-engineered qualities, like something in a now-obsolete experiment. She knew she should have recognised him all along. Perhaps she had. Had he recognised her? Impossible to tell. Underneath her amnesia the memory itself lay swaddled. It was the unthought known, always tucked carefully away, a self-deception under a self-deception. How could he have grown so old? The telephone began to ring again, the white cat jumped on to the table and walked about fiercely. There in the water light of the unreconstructed dining room, the Mexican box glimmered like tarnished silver: the dark figure behind the wheelchair reached over to pick it up.

That was enough to send Anna out of the garden, stumbling down the side passage, hurrying away from 121, The Oaks to the relative sanity of the suburban afternoon, all the rest of which she spent wandering confusedly about, up one long street and down the next, heat ringing around her from cracked paving, until she emerged blinking and puzzled, hard by Carshalton Ponds. The High Street lay uneasily under the sun, full of excavations — shallow, affectless scoops, the product of underpowered machinery and half-hearted plans, fenced off behind a long maze of red and white barriers, which, like the cars in the street, resembled plastic toys pumped up to appeal to some infantile aesthetic.

A room the colour of a headache, she thought. And why had the window once been covered with roasting foil?

Her journey home was slow. The train — as poorly maintained as any public machinery since the serial recessions of the 2010s — failed repeatedly, a minute here, two minutes there; then twenty minutes at a station somewhere near Streatham, during which period, a boy and a girl of college age, who had been kissing energetically since they got on, played a complicated little game at the open carriage door. He stood on the platform, while she leaned out towards him from the train. He kept saying: ‘Well, tara, I’ll see you back there.’ She would wait for him to go, then — when he remained standing there on the platform five feet away grinning at her — laugh and say, ‘That’s what you think, is it?’ Then they would both laugh, the boy would half turn away, and they would start again.

‘I’ll see you back there. We’ll decide where to put it then, it’ll be fun.’

‘It won’t go in the corner whatever you say.’

‘I’m off now, anyway.’

‘I bet you are.’

Suddenly the doors began to close. ‘Tara then,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll see you back there.’

‘Tara,’ the girl said, turning away. At the last minute she squeezed between the doors, struggled off the train and threw her arms round him. They took a few stumbling paces along the platform towards the exit, laughing and bumping hips and wrestling at one another’s shoulders. The girl made a fist and scrubbed at the boy’s scalp with it. ‘Hey!’ he said.

By the time Anna got back it was almost dark. Craneflies tumbled into the windows, stumbling and crawling stupidly about the glass, pinned there by the papery force of their own wings. The cat was out. Anna filled his bowl with tuna surprise, and put two goat’s cheese and spinach tartlets in the oven for herself. Marnie rang while they were heating up. ‘What a day!’ she told Anna. ‘Work was just appalling.’ Morning traffic had made her an hour late, she said. ‘The whole of Clerkenwell was at a standstill.’

‘Darling,’ Anna said, ‘it’s been at a standstill for twenty years.’

Looking for something equivalent to offer, she told Marnie about the lovers on the train. ‘After they’d gone,’ she finished, ‘I turned to look at the other passengers, and I was the only one smiling.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘I felt like a fool,’ Anna replied, without a moment’s thought.

‘Still,’ Marnie said: ‘Romantic.’ Then she said that she had a hospital appointment the next morning. ‘It’s just a scan,’ she said. ‘But I wondered if you’d come with me.’

‘Of course I will!’ Anna said, astonished.

‘It’s nothing, I expect,’ Marnie said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

One in the morning: unable to sleep, Anna switched on the 24 hour news, hoping, though she would not have admitted it to herself, for some indication that Michael Kearney had come home. Nothing overt, she thought; just something casual buried in the coverage of a scientific conference. A clue. All she received was a sense that there were no longer any real events in the world — that, whatever the ‘news’, nothing was actually happening until the camera turned its eye on each short jerky scene. Palm trees — enacting ‘stirred by an evening wind’ —would jump suddenly, almost guiltily, into life as the wire service prepared to objectify them. In the satellite lag before the stringer spoke, you heard a faint, repetitive voice which sounded like gak gak gak. Later she stood in the new bathroom, whispering anxiously:

‘Are you there?’ and, ‘You do like it, don’t you? You did say you liked it!’ Her erratic five-year transit of the suburbs and dormitories of South London — launched after the death of Tim Waterman, accelerating when Marnie left home — was over. The events of the afternoon had proved that. Nothing had been solved. She was still unable to remember what happened all those years ago, the night Michael entrusted her with the pocket drive. She stood by the bedroom window, rooting through her handbag. Out in the garden, a faint mist crept across the meadow from the river to melt among the orchard trees. Eventually she found the drive and held it like a titanium shell to her ear, as if it might have verbal instructions for her. ‘Oh, Michael, I know you’re there. Can’t you just come back and help?’

No answer: except that in front of her the summerhouse burst grandly and silently into flames, as black against the sky as the woodcut illustration in a book of Tarot cards.