Empty Space

TWENTY TWO The See-Not Gate

Waking out of a foul dream to gently hectoring telephone calls from her daughter, Anna Waterman allowed herself to be persuaded into one last session with Helen Alpert.

The doctor had spent much of the morning arguing with a Citroën parts supplier in Richmond and was pleasantly surprised when her client arrived carrying take-out lattes and almond croissants for them both. Had Anna lost weight since her previous visit? Perhaps not, Helen Alpert decided; perhaps it was in fact a postural change. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Anna,’ she said, though she never drank coffee after eight in the morning.

On her part, Anna felt ashamed of herself. It was like being the one to break up a relationship. Prior to buying the coffee she had spent half an hour on Hammersmith Bridge, gazing down at the brown water at some people learning to scull, miserably trying to bring herself to face the doctor. After that, the consulting room, with its cut flowers and tranquil light, seemed such a zone of peace, and Helen Alpert so welcoming, that she didn’t know where to begin. For years, she explained, she had lived in a kind of suspended animation. That seemed to be over now. During the last few months, life had been waking her out of a sleep she didn’t want to relinquish, forcing her to take part again.

‘That’s what I haven’t liked about it.’

‘No one likes that,’ the doctor agreed.

‘No. But they want it anyway.’

‘Anna, I’m interested in the way you put it, life “forcing” you to take part again. What sort of thing do you mean?’

‘For example, Marnie’s not well.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I found that I welcomed it. I know that sounds odd.’ Having admitted Marnie to the negotiation, Anna became unsure how much space to allow her. ‘Anyway, it’s time someone looked after her for a change.’

‘You feel she’s been the parent for too long?’

‘And something else has happened,’ Anna said, ‘which I’d rather not talk about.’

The doctor smiled. ‘Your business is your business.’

Given their circumstances, Anna considered this the cheapest of jibes. ‘Actually I just want to live my life,’ she heard herself say, with somewhat more emphasis than she had intended.

‘Everyone wants that. What exactly is wrong with Marnie?’

‘She’s having tests.’

There followed a silence, during which Dr Alpert played with one of her gel pens and made it clear that she was expecting more. Anna considered describing the visit to St Narcissus — the women shackled to their symptoms by the system and to their lives by mobile phone; the fatuous receptionist; the cancer-shaped stain on the ceiling — but preferring to avoid the interpretive bout that would inevitably follow, in which she would feel compelled to take part out of simple courtesy, said instead, ‘I never wanted to examine my life, I just wanted to be inside it.’ This had the nature of a bid or gambit, she realised. ‘Not,’ she qualified, before Helen Alpert could take it up, ‘that I never had a point of view on myself. Of course I did. Look,’ she said. ‘The fact is, Helen — you’ll understand me, I know you will — I’ve met someone. A man.’ She laughed. ‘Well, more of a boy, really. Is that awful? Michael is dead, but I feel alive again, and that’s what I want to be. Alive.’

This much denial filled the doctor’s heart with rueful admiration. ‘I’m delighted,’ she said, though it must have been clear that she was not. She wondered why she bothered. She reached across the desk and put her hands over Anna’s. ‘Tell me what you dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you why you mustn’t stop coming here. Not yet.’

‘Do you know, I didn’t dream at all last night,’ Anna said. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

Half an hour later Helen Alpert accompanied her client to the door, where, both eager to admit how they would miss one another, they said goodbye. While Anna walked swiftly up Chiswick Mall towards Hammersmith without looking back, Helen crossed the road and leaned on the river wall. It was a sunny morning, but the air had an edge: September, accepting that the game was up. The Thames ran low, with a sullenness that suggested the tide was on the turn. Two or three mallards, who had looked as if they were going to make a morning of it, honking and squabbling in the mud, suddenly took off and swept west, gaining height until they vanished behind the trees on the far bank.

Back inside, she put the Waterman file away; then changed her mind and, leafing through it angrily, began to make a fresh set of notes. The client, her personality frozen in adolescence, had disguised herself as an adult for the duration of her marriage to Tim Waterman. To what end? She had effectively erased the abjection of her life with her first husband, yet remained bound to it, and through it to the unthought known. Why allow the disguise to fall away now? As to the significance of the repeating dream: other dreams seemed as diagnostically valuable, and moreover came with all the necessary tools for their own decoding. The central problem, of course, was Michael Kearney. Helen Alpert couldn’t imagine being unable to forget a man whilst at the same time being unable to remember him. Anna’s self-deception seemed to have spread itself, deft and obdurate, into the real world: the very sparseness of Kearney’s biography — mathematician, suicide, patch of fog in every life he touched — gave him an unfocused quality.

Today, however, the doctor found herself more interested in Brian Tate, who — casting himself as the assistant, the unassuming experimentalist, workhorse to his friend’s conceptual genius — had committed career suicide so as not be left out of the grand finale of Kearney’s psychodrama. The great difference between the two men was this: Dr Alpert knew enough about Tate’s subsequent life to find him. She even had an address, somewhere deep in gentle Walthamstow, cocoon of the North London academic mafia. The file remained on her desk all morning. She took it with her to her favourite restaurant, Le Vacherin at Acton Green, where she read it again while lunch ran through its rewarding, quietly inevitable cycle — duck egg cocotte to assiette of hare to prune and Armagnac tart — and the tables emptied around her. ‘Do you know,’ she told her waitress, looking up in surprise to find it was already two in the afternoon, ‘I think I’d like the bill.’

She was soon on the way to Walthamstow. If he could be found, Brian Tate might perhaps be persuaded to speak — about Kearney, about the events of that time, about the original Anna. It would be unethical to contact him, certainly. She would have to admit, too, that she was uncovering some unsuspected feature of her own personality. Until now she’d made sure to buffer her life from the client’s, proud of the fact that in the face of failure she had always been able to find closure without entanglement.

By three in the afternoon, thick moist air had piled itself into Carshalton High Street, the sharpness of the morning having long given way to a sourceless, muggy heat. Anna Waterman wandered fretfully up and down, trying to put off the inevitable encounter.

She leafed through the second hand books in the Oxfam shop; stood for a moment next to the artificial cascade in Grove Park, where the falling water evaporated with a smell like stale bird feathers. Eventually, on the pretext of getting lunch, she went into a pub near the ponds and ordered a pint of beer. The taste of it caused her to remember the boy on top of her, so hard and nervous, his eyes inturned. Her afternoon with him came back less like a memory of events than a single seamless rush of sensation — a shiver everyone knows but no one knows the name of — and she had to walk up and down looking at the posters on the wall by the bar to give herself something to do. Club Chat Noir. The Aviator Club. A traction engine rally in October; in December, the Chinese Circus. After that, she gave up on herself and sat in a corner and let the afternoon fade into evening. People wandered in and out, saying things like, ‘I can’t cope, I was expected not to live.’ She caught the word ‘patterning’ or perhaps ‘patenting’; then, decisively, ‘contracts’; or perhaps it was ‘contacts’. On the TV above the bar, a European football game began. Pulling Anna’s third pint of Young’s, the barman looked up emptily and then away.

Fake beams, artex ceilings and floral carpet each have a profound — if under-investigated — anxiolytic effect of their own: by seven o’ clock, she had managed to forget the discomfort of her encounter with Dr Alpert and gather enough of herself together to face 121, The Oaks.

As she left the pub, the evening rush was under way. ‘He can’t have steak,’ someone called out, ‘it’ll give him piles!’

Laughter.

Away from the centre the streets were wrapped in foreign-seeming air — air that warmed and yellowed the night without transforming it. You expected to hear cicadas, catch sight of your own shadow on a curved stucco wall behind which growths of palm or jacaranda further enclosed a shuttered domain. But all you found was the usual holly tree and dirty pebbledash, and in the mossy driveway an unreliable British sports car from the 1970s or a short-wheelbase Land Rover bought for a gap-year tour: some late-adolescent project abandoned under its green tarpaulin fifteen years before, as the globalised economies, running out of new services to sell one another, preoccupied themselves with their own decline.

Holding up the pocket drive like a permit, Anna made her way round to the rear of the house. She found the main window dimly lit, as if by a source somewhere else in the house. When she pressed her face against the glass, everything was exactly as she had seen it last: rippled green lino; a roll of carpet propped up in the corner opposite the door; and on the table the little pressed-tin Mexican box containing a downscaled human skull nestled in scarlet lace. An old sofa, loose-covered in what might have been chintz, now faced the table. On it sat two women, short, heavily-built and dressed in black clothes, each with an identical Harrods shopping bag resting on her knees. Anna could hear their voices, but not what they were saying. After a few minutes a thin indistinct figure appeared in the doorway, pushing a wheelchair. It was the boy who had offered her Lost Horizon.

Brian Tate looked worse than ever. His upper body, no longer able to support itself, sagged forward against the chair’s nylon restraints; his skull — bald, ulcered and fragile-looking, as if the bone had thinned year-on-year since Michael Kearney abandoned him to his doomed interpretation of their data — had fallen so far to one side that it rested on his own left shoulder. His mouth was permanently open. One eye was closed, the eyelid drawn down, the cheek beneath sagging; while the other, as blue as a bird’s egg, looked brightly at the wall, the window, the Mexican box with its curious contents, whatever he happened to be facing. It was alive and focused, but it was only an eye: it wasn’t necessarily connected to anything. In his lap lay a greasy brown paper bag. The boy parked the wheelchair next to the table, facing the sofa. He set the brake carefully, forced a white 1960s motorcycle helmet and ski-goggles on to Tate’s head — a process which involved some physical effort — then sat down cross-legged on the floor.

‘There,’ he said, conversationally: ‘He’s here.’

The women received this in silence, as listless and bored as patients in a dentist’s waiting room. They had left very little space on the sofa, but its third occupant, a small middle-aged man with bright red hair, had managed to squeeze in between them. He wriggled and smiled around, as if it had been a recent, good-natured public struggle. With his dirty fleece, alcohol tan and hoarse, personalised way of breathing, he looked like someone whose lifestyle choices would soon move him outdoors and to the centre of London, where he would limp up and down Shaftesbury Avenue calling, ‘I’m in bits, me!’ and showing the tourists the Krokodil sore on his neck. ‘Hey, look mate, I’m in bits!’

For two or three minutes these three stared at Brian Tate — they were less acknowledging his presence, Anna thought, than confirming his existence in some way — then, without speaking, and with no sign that they were aware of each other, or had a shared purpose, they busied themselves with their clothes. The women folded back their skirts from their thighs and slid forward so that they could open their legs; the man struggled to unzip the flies of his tight Levis. There was a rustle of cloth, a sigh or two. They all began masturbating. Two or three minutes later, they were still at it, staring ahead with expressions of absolute vacancy on their faces. Anna thought she could smell them through the glass. It was a sharp, yeasty smell, not unpleasant but not very attractive either. At the same time, Brian Tate’s liver-spotted hands began to fumble with the brown paper bag in his lap, from which they extracted a half-eaten double bacon cheeseburger. This, Tate broke into pieces, carefully separating the bun from the meat, which he held up, nodding his head and smiling at a point in the air above the Mexican box.

‘It’s coming up,’ the boy said suddenly, in a strangled voice. Silence from the others — perhaps a barely perceptible speeding up of their efforts. ‘It’s coming up!’

The women groaned from the couch. The red-haired man yelped and gasped. A telephone rang in the distance. The Mexican box, illuminated suddenly from within, emitted a cloud of fine white ash, which poured up and out into the room. ‘My name,’ said a voice from the box. ‘My name is —’ Then: ‘Is anybody there?’ Brian Tate struggled to answer, but nothing would come out of his mouth. He had plunged one hand into the cloud of ash, and seemed to be offering, for the approval of something Anna couldn’t see, the remains of the cheeseburger. After a moment, the glass door of the box fell off its hinges and Tate’s white oriental cat burst out. Snatching the hamburger, it jumped on to his shoulder and began eating. At this the women redoubled their efforts, moaning, straining, grinding busily at themselves, their activity driving the room towards a state in which it would be both dimensionless and yet full of possibilities. Shimmers distorted the air around the sofa: jumping to his feet, the boy gave the wheelchair a violent shove in a direction without logic — it was parallel, Anna thought, to an axis the room didn’t share — and suddenly it had spun away on a curious spiralling trajectory. Tate and his cat went with it, growing smaller and smaller as they accelerated, until they vanished into an upper corner. The figures on the sofa fell silent. Their will dissipated, their clothing disarranged, their shoulders covered with ash like victims of bombardment, they slumped in foetal postures. With a sharp report, the window cracked from side to side and fell into the flowerbed at Anna’s feet. The boy poked his head out and said, ‘Hey, you should have come in!’ He was tucking his penis into his jeans like a roll of soft pale chamois. Anna shuddered unhappily. She hurried out on to the street and glared back at the roof of 121. What did she expect to see? She wasn’t sure. Brian Tate and his cat, perhaps, spinning upwards into a milky overcast through which could be made out every so often two or three unidentifiable stars, the only evidence anyone has of the infinite space in which we believe we live.

She had remembered everything but it meant nothing.

‘I’ve had enough, Michael,’ she said, as if Kearney really had come back from the dead and was standing beside her, the way they had stood nearly thirty years ago outside the same house, in the aftermath of events equally strange and destabilising: ‘I’m up to here with it all.’

She caught the nine twenty-seven into town from Carshalton Beeches. Local services were delayed by works. Freight rumbled through Clapham: cement in dry bulk, denser and more real than the place itself or the people passing through with their soft furnishings taped in plastic bags or their cat in a basket. Anna looked around and wished she had never articulated her fantasy of living there: under the mercury lamps it proved to be just another railway station. ‘I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she remembered saying to Helen Alpert, ‘if only for the company.’ Just another poor joke at the therapist’s expense, one more bid for attention. A man in a yellow safety vest wandered around, stopping occasionally to peer into the lighted window of the platform café as if the things inside — cups, cakes, cabinets, paper serviettes — weren’t perfectly ordinary, perfectly easy to see, perfectly legible as things. Otherwise there was hardly anyone around.

Her connection was slow. Its wheels broadcast a mournful ringing noise to the woods and empty pasture. Home at last, thirty-five minutes after midnight, she listened to a message from Marnie, ‘Mum, please don’t just go off like that without telling me. Anyway, how did it go this morning?’ Anna sat on the loo with her knickers down; she took off her shoes and scratched the sole of one foot. At school in the late 2000s, Marnie had been so dismayed by the mobile phone that, though it was already the great load-bearing pillar of juvenile culture, she had refused to own one. What had gone wrong since then? ‘Anyway, I want to hear how it all went!’

Anna could not guess the meaning of the scenes she had witnessed in Carshalton; equally, there seemed to be no way of interpreting her own history. In the end, if you have a certain sort of mind, you can’t even separate the mundane from the bizarre. That’s why you find yourself face down in the bathroom eighteen years old, studying the reflection of your own pores in the shiny black floor tiles. And if afterwards you choose a dysfunctional person to be your rescuer, how is that your fault? Who could know? More importantly, the past can’t be mended — only left behind. People, the dead included, always demand too much. She was sick of being on someone else’s errand. ‘I did my best,’ she thought, ‘and now I can’t be bothered any more.’ After making such an indifferent job of it for so long, what she wanted to do was live. As a starter she opened the downstairs doors and windows, then a bottle of red wine. She threw the pocket drive in the recycling bin.

If she called Marnie they would only shout at one another. Preferring to avoid that, she took the bottle to the sofa —

— then almost immediately dragged herself through layers of silent chaos to consciousness, to find James the cat staring into her face, purring coarsely with something between pleasure and possessiveness. She was naked. At some point she had woken without remembering it, closed the house up, taken herself to bed. ‘Get off, James —’ rolling away from him and off the queen size box-spring, desperate for something to drink — ‘We aren’t even the same species.’ Though she was not directly aware of it, her dream continued.

She lay on her side on a black glass floor in her Versace gown and long black gloves, upper body raised on one elbow. She was not turning from a woman into an animal or from an animal into a woman. If she was not in transit, neither was she in any sense ‘caught’ between those two states: she was busily occupying them both at once. Though to herself she did not seem entirely Anna, she did not seem entirely anything else: she felt smeary and blurred at significant sites of paradox or conflict, in the manner of a Francis Bacon. Waking up never interrupted this hard, thankless work of superposition (‘Someone has to do it, darling,’ she imagined saying to Marnie) or much diminished her sense of it. It was all the worse for being unconscious, implicit, ongoing. It was all the worse because it felt like a commentary on her life, welling up from some internal source she preferred not to acknowledge. Halfway out of the room, she went back and hugged the cat. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said to him. ‘James, if you want my advice, never be a failed suicide. You won’t hear the bloody last of it, even from yourself.’

James allowed her to carry him downstairs. He dashed into the night the moment she opened the kitchen door, only to return excitedly a few minutes later with a neon kidney in his mouth. Perhaps two inches by one and a half, with plump, eye-catching curves, it had a saturated pale blue colour and a transparent rind that seemed both resistant and pliable. James crouched on the worktop and sheared into it with his back teeth, breathing heavily through the same side of his mouth. ‘Oh for god’s sake,’ Anna said, turning away in case she saw it burst. ‘I’m closing the door.’ But a long soft flash of lightning caught her in the doorway, throwing her into silhouette and projecting her shadow against the opposite wall. There was no thunder. A wave of moist heat rolled into the kitchen. It was transformational weather, weather suited to another country: a thick low cloudbase, smells of static water pocked with rain. The cat looked up, then down again.

‘Hello?’ Anna whispered. ‘Hello?’ She peeped out into the garden. It stretched away, elongated, too narrow, rippling with heat. Quiet yet catastrophic changes of light revealed, a long way off, the summerhouse.

‘On fire again,’ thought Anna. ‘How tiresome.’

This time it presented as a whole series of buildings: it was a sixteenth-century windmill on the Downs, a Dickensian lapboard cottage as tarry as an upturned boat on a beach, a Palladian folly collapsing into the Pagan site on which it stood. These structures slowly replaced one another in a shifting field of view. They loomed and shrank, as if they were approaching or receding. Each arrived not simply with its own architectural style but with its own style of mediation, from hard-edge photographic to St Ives impressionist, from construction-paper silhouette to matchstick hobbyist Gothic. One minute it was a woodcut of a summerhouse, with static flames; the next, impasto rubbed on with someone’s thumb.

Pausing only to remove Kearney’s computer drive from the recycling bin, Anna went out and stood in the orchard, barefoot, naked, quiet, no longer sure what age she might be.

‘Whoever you are,’ she said reasonably, ‘I don’t know what you want.’

As if in response, the summerhouse cycled through a few more versions of itself, becoming in succession a Tarot card (the Tower, always falling, always in flames, index and harbinger of a life in transit); a canonical firework from someone’s vanished childhood, a ‘volcano’ wrapped in red and blue paper, pouring out pink-dyed light, smoke, showers of sparks, thick dribbles of lava; and a sagging fairground marquee, with scalloped eaves and pennants in many different colours. Cartoon bottle-rockets fizzed into the air behind it, bursting in showers of objects which toppled back to earth with inappropriate noises — plastic crockery that rang like a bell, an Edwardian railway train pumping out the sinewy sound of pigeon wings in an empty industrial space — folding themselves up and vanishing even as they fell. These objects smelled of leather, frost, lemon meringue pie; they smelled of precursor chemicals. They smelled of Pears Soap.

Anna approached until the heat began to tighten the skin above her eyes. At that distance, the summerhouse steadied itself. It reverted to the familar. Then a dense spew of smaller items fountained up from the flowerbeds, poured out of the door, blew off the roof, resolving itself into a display of a thousand fireflies, sleet falling through car headlights, showers of jewels and boiled sweets, enamelled lapel badges, shards of stained glass. Strings of coloured fairy lights and fake pearls, glittering Christmas baubles. Little mechanical toys — beetles, novelty swimmers, jumping kangaroos, all powered by rusted-up clockwork from the first great phase of Chinese industrialisation. Parti-coloured juggling balls. A thousand giveaway pens. A thousand cheap GPS systems that no longer ran. Bells and belts. Birds that really whistled; birds that sang. A million tiny electrical components and bits of ancient circuit boards as if every transistor radio ever made had been buried in the earth, and with them — like a kind of grave-goods! — the faint music and voices of Workers’ Playtime, Woman’s Hour or Journey Into Space, everything they once had played. A fog of small consumer goods. All the rubbish of a life, or someone else’s life.

Anna Waterman née Selve stopped a pace or two before the summerhouse door. She tilted her head and listened.

‘Hello?’ she said.

She said: ‘Oh, what is it now?’

Everything was very calm and quiet and smelling of the hotel bathroom when she stepped inside and began to fall. She let go of the computer drive in surprise. At the last moment, James the black and white cat darted between her legs. All three of them, the woman, the animal and the data, fell out of this world together. Glare and dark, strobing into sudden silence and things switching off busily, up and down the whole electromagnetic spectrum.