Last and First Contacts (collection)

No More Stories

‘It’s strange to find myself in this position. Dying, I mean. I’ve always found it hard to believe that things will just go on afterwards. After me. That the sun will come up, the milkman will call. Will it all just fold up and go away when I’ve gone?’

These were the first words his mother said to Simon, when he got out of the car.

She stood in her doorway, old-lady stocky, solid, arms folded, over eighty years old. Her wrinkles were runnels in papery flesh that ran down to a small, frowning mouth. She peered around the close, as if suspicious.

Simon collected his small suitcase from the back of the car. It had a luggage tag from a New York flight, a reminder that he was fifty years old, and that he did have a life beyond his mother’s, working for a biotech company in London, selling gen-enged goldfish as children’s pets. Now that he was back in this Sheffield suburb where he’d grown up, his London life seemed remote, a dream.

He locked the car and walked up to his mother. She presented her cheek for him to kiss. It was cold, rough-textured.

‘I had a good journey,’ he said, for he knew she wouldn’t ask.

‘I am dying, you know,’ she said, as if to make sure he understood.

‘Oh, Mother.’ He put an arm around her shoulders. She was hard, like a lump of gristle and bone, and didn’t soften into the hug. She had cancer. They had never actually used that word between them.

She stepped back to let him into the house. The hall was spotless, obsessively cleaned and ordered, yet it smelled stale. A palm frond folded into a cross hung on the wall, a reminder that Easter was coming, a relic of intricate Catholic rituals he’d abandoned when he left home. He put his suitcase down.

‘Don’t put it there,’ his mother said.

A familiar claustrophobia closed in around him. ‘All right.’ He grabbed the case and climbed the stairs, fourteen of them as he used to count in his childhood. But now there was an old-lady safety banister fixed to the wall.

She had made up one of the twin beds in the room he had once shared with his brother. There wasn’t a trace of his childhood left in here, none of his toys or books or school photos.

He came downstairs. ‘Mother, I’m gasping. Can I make a cup of tea?’

‘The pot’s still fresh. I’ll fetch a cup and saucer.’ She bustled off to the kitchen.

He walked into the lounge.

The only change he could see since his last visit was a fancy new standard lamp with a downturned cowl, to shed light on the lap of an old lady sitting in the best armchair, facing the telly, peering at her sewing with fading eyes. The old carriage clock, a legacy from a long-dead great uncle, still sat in its place on the concrete 1970s fireplace. The clock was flanked by a clutter of photos, as usual. Most of them were fading colour prints of grandchildren. Simon had no grandchildren to offer, and so was unrepresented here. But the photos had been pushed back to make room for a new image in a gold frame. Brownish, blurred and faded, it was a portrait of a smiling young man in a straw boater. He had a long, strong face. Simon recognised the photo, taken from a musty old album and evidently blown up. It was his grandfather, Mother’s Dad, who had died when Simon was five or six.

Just for a moment the light seemed odd to him. Cold, yellow-purple. And there was something strange beyond the window. Pillow-like shapes, gleaming in a watery sun. He saw all this from the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look directly, the light from the picture window turned spring green, shining from the small back garden, with its lawn and roses and the last of the azalea blossom. Maybe his eyes were tired from the drive, playing tricks.

‘It’s just for comfort. The photo.’

The male voice made Simon turn clumsily, almost tripping.

A man sat on the sofa, almost hidden behind the door, with a cup of tea on an occasional table. ‘Sorry. You didn’t see me. Didn’t mean to make you jump.’ He stood and shook Simon’s hand. ‘I’m Gabriel Nolan.’ His voice had a soft Irish burr. Maybe sixty, he was short, round, bald as an egg. He wore a pale jacket, black shirt, and dog collar. He had biscuit crumbs down his front.

Simon guessed, ‘Father Nolan?’

‘From Saint Michael’s. The latest incumbent.’

The last parish priest Simon remembered had been the very old, very frail man who had confirmed him, aged thirteen.

Mother came in, walking stiffly, cradling a cup and saucer. ‘Sit down, Simon, you’re blocking the light.’

Simon sat in the room’s other armchair, with his back to the window. Mother poured out some tea with milk, and added sugar, though he hadn’t taken sugar for three decades.

‘Simon was just admiring the portrait of your father, Eileen.’

‘Well, I don’t have many pictures of Dad. You didn’t take many in those days. That’s the best one, I think.’

‘We find comfort in familiar things, in the past.’

‘I always felt safe when Dad was there,’ Mother said. ‘In the war, you know.’

But, Simon thought, Granddad was long dead. She’d led a whole life since then, the life that included Simon’s own childhood. Mother always had been self-centred. Any crisis in her children’s lives, like Mary’s recurrent illness as a child, or the illegitimate kid Peter had fathered as a student, somehow always turned into a drama about her. Now somehow she was back in the past with her own father in her own childhood, and there was no room for Simon.

Mother said, ‘There might not be anybody left who remembers Dad, but me. Do you think we get deader, when there’s nobody left who remembers us?’

‘We live on in the eyes of Christ.’

Simon said, ‘Father Nolan, don’t you think Mother should talk to the doctor again? She won’t listen to me.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Simon,’ Mother said.

‘Best to accept,’ said Father Nolan. ‘If your mother has. Best not to question.’

They both stared back at him, seamless, united. Fifty years old he felt awkward, a child who didn’t know what to say to the grown-ups.

He stood up, putting down his tea cup. ‘I’ve some shirts that could do with hanging.’

Mother sniffed. ‘There might be a bit of space. Later there’s my papers to do.’

Another horror story. Simon fled upstairs. A little later, he heard the priest leave.

The ‘papers’ were her financial transactions, Premium Bonds and tax vouchers and battered old bank books. And they had to go through the dreaded rusty biscuit box she kept under her bed, which held her will and her life insurance policies, stored up in the event of a death she’d been talking about for thirty years. It even held her identity card from the war, signed in a childish hand.

Simon always found it painful to sit and plod through all this stuff. The tin box was worst, of course.

Later she surprised him by asking to go for a walk.

It was late afternoon. Mother put on a coat, a musty gabardine that smelled of winter, though the bright April day was warm. Simon had grown up in this close. It was a short, stubby street of semi-detached houses leading up to a main road and a dark sandstone wall, beyond which lay a park. But his childhood was decades gone, and the houses had been made over out of all recognition, and the space where he’d played football was now jammed full of cars. Walking here, he felt as if he was trying to cram himself into clothes he’d outworn.

They crossed the busy main road, and then walked along the line of the old wall to the gateway to the park. Or what was left of it. In the last few years the park had been sliced through by a spur of the main road, along which cars now hissed, remote as clouds. Simon’s old home seemed stranded.

Simon and his mother stuck to a gravel path. Underfoot was dogshit and, in the mud under the benches, beer cans, fag ends and condoms. Mother clung to his arm. Walking erratically she pulled at him, heavy, like an unfixed load.

Mother talked steadily, about Peter and Mary, and the achievements and petty woes of their respective children. Mary, older than Simon, was forever struggling on, in Mother’s eyes, burdened by difficult kids and a lazy husband. ‘She’s got a lot to put up with, always did.’ Peter, the youngest, got a tougher time, perceived as selfish and shiftless and lacking judgement. Simon’s siblings’ lives were more complicated than that. But to Mother they were ciphers, dominated by the characteristics she had perceived in them when they were kids.

She asked nothing about his own life.

Later, she prepared the evening meal.

As she was cooking, Simon dug his laptop out of his suitcase, and brought it down to the cold, formal dining room, where there was a telephone point. He booted up and went through his emails. He worked for a biotech start-up that specialised in breeding genetically modified goldfish, giving them patterns in bright Captain Nemo colours targeted at children. It was a good business, and expanding. The strategy was to domesticate biotech. In maybe five or ten years they would even sell genome-sequencing kits to kids, or anyhow their parents, so they could ‘paint’ their own fish designs.

That was a bit far off in terms of fifty-year-old Simon’s career, and things were moving so fast in this field that his own skills, in software, were constantly being challenged. But the work was demanding and fun, and as he watched the little fish swim around with ‘Happy Birthday Julie’ written on their flanks, he thought he glimpsed the future.

His mother knew precisely nothing about all this. The glowing emails were somehow comforting, a window to another world where he had an identity.

Anyhow, no fires to put out today. He shut down the connection.

Then he phoned his brother and sister with his mother’s news.

‘She’s fine in herself. She’s cooking supper right now… Yes, she’s keeping the house okay. I suppose when she gets frailer we’ll have to think about that… I’ll stay one night definitely, perhaps two. Might take her shopping tomorrow. Bulky stuff, you know, bog rolls and washing powder…

‘Things are a bit tricky for you, I suppose.’ Exams, school trips, holidays. Mary’s ferocious commitment to her bridge club – ‘They can’t have a match if I don’t turn up, you know!’ Peter’s endless courses in bookkeeping and beekeeping, arboriculture and aromatherapy, an ageing dreamer’s continuing quest to be elevated above the other rats in the race. All of them reasons not to visit their mother.

Simon didn’t particularly blame them. Neither of them seemed to feel they had to come, the way he did, which left him with no choice but to be here. And of course with their kids they were busier than he was, in a sense.

Mother had her own views. Peter was selfish. Mary was always terribly busy, poor lamb.

She’d once been a good cook, if a thrifty one, her cuisine shaped by the experience of wartime rationing. But over the years her cooking had simplified to a few ready-made dishes. Tonight it was boil-in-the-bag fish. You got used to it.

After they ate, they spent the evening playing games. Not Scrabble, which had been a favourite of Simon’s childhood. She insisted on cribbage, which she had played with her father, in her own childhood. She had a worn board that must have been decades old. She had to explain the arcane rules to him.

The evening was very, very long, in the silence of the room with a blank telly screen, the time stretched out by the ticks of Uncle Billy’s carriage clock.

In the morning he came out of his bedroom, dressed in his pyjama bottoms, heading for the bathroom.

Father Gabriel Nolan was coming up the stairs with a cup of tea on a saucer. He gave Simon a sort of thin-lipped smile. In the bright morning light Simon saw that dried mucus clung to the hairs protruding from his fleshy nose.

‘She’s taken a turn for the worse in the night,’ said the priest. ‘A stroke, perhaps. It’s all very sudden.’ And he bustled into Mother’s bedroom.

Simon just stood there.

He quickly used the bathroom. He went back to his bedroom and put on his pants and yesterday’s shirt.

Then, in his socks, he went into Mother’s bedroom. The curtains were still closed, the only light a ghostly blue glow soaking through the curtains. It was like walking into an aquarium. She was lying on the right-hand side of the double bed she had shared with Simon’s father for so long. She was flat on her back, staring up. Her arms were outside the sheets, which were neatly tucked in. The cup of tea sat on her bedside cabinet. Father Nolan sat at her bedside, holding her hand.

Her eyes flickered towards Simon.

Simon, frightened, distressed, was angry to find this smut-nosed, biscuit-crumby priest in his mother’s bedroom. ‘Have you called the doctor?’

Mother murmured something, at the back of her throat.

‘No doctor,’ said Father Nolan.

‘Is that a decision for you to make?’

‘It’s a decision for her,’ said the priest, gravely, not unkindly, firmly. ‘She wants to go downstairs. The lounge.’

‘She’s better off in bed.’

‘Let her see the garden.’

Father Nolan’s calm, unctuous tone was grating. Simon snapped, ‘How are we going to get her down the stairs?’

‘We’ll manage.’

They lifted Mother up from the bed, and wrapped her in blankets. Simon saw there was a bedpan, sticking out from under the bed. It was actually a plastic potty, a horrible dirty old pink thing he remembered from his own childhood. It was full of thick yellow pee. Father Nolan must have helped her use it.

They carried her down the stairs together, Simon holding her under the arms, the priest taking her legs.

When they got to the bottom of the stairs, it went dark on the landing above. Simon looked up. The stairs seemed very tall and high, the landing quite black. ‘Maybe a bulb blew,’ he said. But the lights hadn’t been on, the landing illuminated by daylight.

Father Nolan said, ‘She doesn’t need to go upstairs again.’

Simon didn’t know what he meant. Under his distress about his mother, he found he was obscurely frightened.

They shuffled into the lounge. They sat Mother in her armchair, facing the garden’s green.

What now?

‘What about breakfast?’

‘Toast for me,’ said Father Nolan.

Simon went to the kitchen and ran slices of white bread, faintly stale, through the toaster.

The priest followed him in. He had taken his jacket off. His black shirt had short sleeves, and he had powerful stubby arms, like a wrestler. They sat at the small kitchen table, and ate buttered toast.

Simon asked, ‘Why are you here? This morning, I mean. Did Mother call you? I didn’t hear the phone.’

Father Nolan shrugged. ‘I just dropped in. I have a key. She’s got used to having me around, during this, well, crisis. I don’t mind. I share my duties at the parish.’ He complacently chewed his toast.

‘When I was a kid, you smug priests used to make me feel like tripping you up.’

Father Nolan laughed. ‘You’re a good boy. You’d never do that.’

‘“A good boy.” Father, I’m fifty years old.’

‘But you’re always a little boy to your mother.’ He nodded at the fridge, where photographs were stuck to the metal door by magnets. ‘Your brother and sister. You’re the middle one, yes?’

‘Sister older, brother younger.’

‘Mary and Peter. Good Catholic names. But it’s unusual to find a Simon and a Peter in the same Catholic family.’

‘I know.’ Since Simon had learned about Simon Peter the apostle, he had sometimes wondered if Mother had chosen Peter’s name on purpose – as if she was disappointed with the first Simon and hoped for a better version. ‘They’ve both got kids. I’m sure she’d rather one of them was here, frankly. Grandkids jumping all over her.’

‘You’re the one who’s here. That’s what’s important.’

Simon studied him. ‘I don’t believe, you know. Not sure if I ever did, once I was able to think for myself. You can be as calm and certain as you like. I think it’s all a bluff.’

Father Nolan laughed. ‘That’s okay. What you choose to believe or not is irrelevant to the destiny of my immortal soul. And indeed yours.’

It had been a very long time indeed since Simon had even considered the possibility that he might have a soul, some quality that might endure beyond his own death.

He shivered, and stood up. ‘I think I need some air. Maybe I’ll buy a paper.’

‘We’ll be fine here.’

‘Help yourself to tea. It’s in the—’

‘Winston Churchill caddy. I know.’ Father Nolan smiled, and chewed his toast.

He walked up the close, towards the park.

This stub of a road had seemed endless when he was a child. Full of detail, every drain or stopcock cover or broken paving stone a feature in some game or other. Now he felt a stab of pity for a child who perhaps could have done with a bit more stimulation.

But the close seemed long today, stretching off ahead of him, like the hours governed by Uncle Billy’s clock.

And though the sky was clear blue, the light was odd. Weakening. Once he’d sat through a partial eclipse over London, a darkening that was not the setting of the sun but an eerie dimming. That was what this was like. But there was no eclipse due today; he’d have known.

It took an effort to reach the top of the close. And more of an effort to wait for a gap in the stream of dark, anonymous cars, and to cross to the footpath by the park wall. He walked along the wall, letting his fingers trail along the grubby, wind-eroded sandstone.

It had happened so quickly. Would Mother really never make this little journey again? Was that awful bagged fish really the last meal the woman who had fed him as a baby would ever make for him? Grief swirled around in him, unfocussed. He thought vaguely about the calls he would have to make.

At the gate, he stopped.

There was no park. No sooty oak trees, no grass, no dog shit.

He saw a plain, a marsh. The sunlight gleamed from a sheet of flat, green, sticky-looking water. Pillow-like shapes pushed out of the water, their surfaces slimy crusts, green and purple. Nothing moved. There was no sound. Of the park, the parade of shops beyond, there was no sign.

It was like the scene he thought he had glimpsed through his mother’s lounge window yesterday. But that had been from the corner of his eye, and had vanished when he looked directly. This was different.

He turned away. The main road was still there, the cars streaming along.

Carefully, he walked back down the road, and into the close. Every step he took towards home made him feel more secure, and the daylight grew stronger. He didn’t dare look back.

At home, Father Nolan was still sitting with Mother. It wasn’t yet lunchtime.

Simon got himself a glass of water and went to the dining room. He booted up his laptop. He dialled into work, to check his emails. He was trying not to think about what he’d seen. He got error messages. The work site didn’t exist.

He heard Father Nolan climbing the stairs, a splashing sound, the toilet flushing. Emptying a bed pan, maybe.

He tried Google. That still existed.

There was a word that had come into his head when he thought about what had become of the park. Stromatolite. He googled it.

Communities of algae. A photo showed mounds just like the ones on the park. Heaped-up mats of bacteria, one on top of another, with mud and sand trapped in between. They had their own complexities, of a sort, each mound a tiny biosphere in its own right.

And they were very ancient, a relic of the days before animals, before insects, before multicelled creatures of any kind.

He followed links, digging at random, drawn by his own professional interest in genetics. The first stromatolites had actually been the height of complexity compared to what had gone before. Once there had been nothing but communities of crude cells in which even ‘species’ could not be said to exist, and genetic information was massively transferred sideways between lineages, as well as from parent cell to offspring. The world was muddy, a vast cellular bun fight. But if you looked closely it had been fast-evolving, inventive, resilient…

Google failed, the browser returning a site-not-found error message.

And then the laptop’s modem reported it couldn’t find a dialling tone.

It seemed to be growing darker. But it wasn’t yet noon. He didn’t want to look out of the window.

Father Nolan walked in. ‘She’s asking for you.’

Simon hesitated. ‘I’d better call Mary and Peter. They ought to know.’

The priest just waited.

At his first try, he got a number-unobtainable tone. Then the dialling tone disappeared. He tried his mobile. There was no service.

It was very dark.

Father Nolan held out his hand. ‘Come.’

In the lounge the curtains were drawn. The excluded daylight was odd, dim, greenish. The only strong light came from Mother’s fancy new reading stand.

The telly was like an empty eye socket. Simon wondered what he would find if he turned it on.

Mother sat in her armchair, swathed in blankets. Of her body only her face showed, and two hands that looked as if all the bones had been drawn out of them. There was a stink of piss and shit, a tang of blood.

Father Nolan sat beside Mother on a footstool, the bedpan at his feet.

‘I probably ought to thank you for doing this,’ Simon said.

‘It comes with the job. I gave her the Last Rites, Simon. I should tell you that.’

Mother, her eyes closed, murmured something. Father Nolan leaned close so he could hear, and smiled. ‘Let tomorrow worry about itself, Eileen.’

Simon asked, ‘What’s happening tomorrow?’

‘She asked if there will be a tomorrow.’

Simon stared at him. ‘When I was a kid,’ he said slowly, ‘I used to wonder what will happen when I die. It seemed outrageous that the universe should go on, after I, the centre of everything, was taken away. Just as my mother said to me yesterday.

‘Then I grew up a bit more. I started to think maybe everybody feels that way. Every finite mortal creature. The two things don’t go together, do they, my smallness, and the bigness of the sky?”

Father Nolan just listened.

Simon stepped towards the window. ‘What will I see if I pull back the curtain?’

‘Don’t,’ said Father Nolan.

‘Do you know what’s going on?’

‘I’m here for her. Not you.’

‘Will you tell me?’

The priest hesitated. ‘You’re a good boy. I suppose you deserve that.’

Simon touched Uncle Billy’s clock, pressed his palm against the wall behind it. ‘Is any of this real?’

‘As real as it needs to be.’

‘Is this really the year 2010?’

‘No.’

‘Then when?’

‘The future. Not as far as you might think.’

‘People are different.’

‘There are no people.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No. But you’re capable of understanding,’ Father Nolan said. ‘It’s no accident you work in biotechnology, you know. It was set up that way, so if you ever asked these questions, you’d have the background to grasp the answer.’

‘What has my job got to do with it?’

‘Nothing in itself. It’s where things are leading. Those Day-Glo fish you sell. How do you do that?’

Simon shrugged. ‘I don’t know the details. I do software. Gene splicing, basically.’

‘You splice genes from where?’

‘A modified soya, I think. Other sources.’

‘Yes. You swap genes around, horizontally, from microbes to plants to animals, even into people. It’s a new kind of gene transfer – or rather a very old one.’

‘Before the stromatolites.’

‘Yes. You’re planning to put this gene-transfer technology on the open market, aren’t you?’

It was like the drive to put a pc in every home, a few decades back. The domestication would start with biotech in the mines and factories and stores. Home use would follow. Eventually advanced home biotech kits, capable of dicing and splicing genomes and nurturing the results, would become as pervasive as pcs and mobile phones. Everybody would have one, and would use it to make new varieties of dogs and budgies, exotic orchids and apples. To create a new life form and release it into the world would be as easy as blogging. It was a question of accelerating trends. The world’s genetic inheritance would become open source. And then, a generation later, the technology would merge with the biology.

Simon said, ‘It’s the logical next step, in marketing terms. Like putting massive computing power in the hands of the public. That would have seemed inconceivable, in 1950. And the secondary results will be as unimaginable as the internet once was. Do you think it’s immoral? Unnatural?’

Father Nolan grinned. ‘If I were what I look like, perhaps I’d think that.’

‘What are you, then?’

‘I’m the end-product of your company’s business plans. Yours and a thousand others. It was only a few decades after your birthday-card goldfish that things took off. Remarkable. Only a few decades, to topple a regime of life that lasted two billion years.’

‘And things were different after that.’

‘Oh, yes. Darwinian evolution was slo-ow. For all the fancy critters that were thrown up, there was hardly a change in the basic biochemical machinery across two billion years.

‘Now there are no non-interbreeding species. Indeed, no individuals. The Darwinian interlude is over, and we are back to gene sharing, the way it used to be.

‘And everything has changed. Global climate change became trivial, for instance. With the fetters off, the biosphere adapted to the new conditions, optimising its metabolic and reproductive efficiency as it went.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘off into space.’

These words, simply spoken, implied a marvellous future.

‘Who is my mother?’

‘We are in a lacuna,’ Father Nolan said.

‘A what?’

‘A gap. A hole. In the totality of a living world. Sorry if that sounds a bit pompous. Your mother is a part of the totality, but cut away, you see. Living out a life as a human once lived it.’

‘Why? Is she being punished?’

‘No.’ He laughed. ‘On the contrary. She wanted to do this. It’s hard to express. We are a multipolar consciousness. She is part of the rest of us – do you see? She was an expression of a global desire.’

‘To do what?’

‘Not to forget.’ He stood up. Grave, patient, he had the manner of a priest, despite his hairy nose, his stained shirt. ‘I think you’re ready.’ He led Simon to the window, and pulled back the curtain.

Green stars.

The garden was gone.

The rest of the house was gone. The close, the park, Sheffield – Earth was gone, irrelevant. Mother had, incredibly, been right in her intuition. It had all been placed there as a stage set for her own life. But now her life had dwindled to the four walls of this room, and the rest of it could be discarded, for she would never need it again.

Just green stars. Simon pressed his ear to the window. He heard a reverberation, like an immense bell.

‘Earth life turning the Galaxy green. Our thoughts span light years. But we don’t want to forget how it was to be human.’ Father Nolan smiled. ‘It’s a paradox. We have in fact lost so much. As you said – the strange tragedy of being mortal in an unending universe. There’s no more poetry. No more epitaphs. No more stories. Just a solemn calm.’

‘Mother wanted to experience it. Human life.’

‘On behalf of the rest of us, yes.’

‘And what are you, Father?’

Father Nolan shrugged. ‘Everything else.’ He let the curtain drop, hiding the green stars.

The electric light was dimming.

Father Nolan sat down beside Mother and held her hand. ‘Only a few more minutes. Then it will be done.’

Simon sat on the other side of the bed. ‘What about me?’

‘You’re only here for her.’

‘But I’m conscious!’

‘Well, of course you are. She chose you, you know. You always thought she didn’t love you, didn’t you? But she chose you to be beside her, at the end, when all the others, Peter, Mary, even her own father, have all gone. Isn’t that enough?’

‘Do I have a soul, Father?’

‘I’m not qualified to say.’

Mother turned her head towards him, he thought. But her eyes were closed.

‘Help me,’ Simon whispered.

Father Nolan looked at him. Then he closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

The glow of the single bulb faded slowly, to black.