Light

THIRTEEN Monster Beach

Kearney and Anna stayed in New York for a week. Then Kearney saw the Shrander again. It was at Cathedral Parkway Station on 110th Street, during some kind of stalled time or hiatus, some empty part of the day. The platforms lay deserted, though you sensed that recently they had been full; the heavily riveted central girders marched off into the echoing dark in either direction. Kearney thought he heard something like the fluttering of a bird among them. When he looked up, there hung the Shrander, or anyway its head.

'Try and imagine,' he had once said to Anna, 'something like a horse's skull. Not a horse's head,'he had cautioned her, 'but its skull.' The skull of a horse looks nothing like the head at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip. 'Imagine,' he had told her, 'a wicked, intelligent, purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak. A few ribbons or strips of flesh dangle and flutter from it. Even the shadow of that is more than you can bear to see.' It was more than he could bear to see, alone on the platform at Cathedral Parkway. He looked up for an instant, then broke and ran. No voice, but it had certainly told him something. Some time later he found himself stumbling about in Central Park. It was raining. Some time after that, he got back to the apartment. He was shivering, and he had thrown up over himself.

'What's the matter?' Anna asked. 'What on earth's the matter with you?'

'Pack,' he told her.

'At least change your clothes,' she said.

He changed his clothes; and she packed; and they rented a car from Avis; and Kearney drove as fast as he dared on to Henry Hudson Parkway and thence out of the city north. The traffic was aggressive, the expressways dark and dirty, knotted up into intersection after intersection like Kearney's nerves, and after less than an hour Anna had to take over because though Kearney wouldn't stop, he couldn't see any more through his headache or the glare of oncoming lights. Even the inside of the car seemed full of night and weather. The radio stations out there weren't identifying themselves, just secreting gangsta rap like a new form of life. 'Where are we?' Kearney and Anna called to one another over the music. 'Go left! Go left''I'm stopping.' 'No, no, carry on!' They were like sailors in a fog. Kearney stared helplessly out of the windscreen, then scrambled over into the back seat and fell asleep suddenly.

Hours later he woke in a pulloff on Interstate 93. He had heard a Gothic, animal, keening noise. It was Anna, kneeling in the front passenger seat, facing away from the windscreen and tearing pages randomly out of the AAA mapbook they had got with the car. As she crumpled each one up and threw it into the footwell, she whispered to herself, 'I don't know where I am, I don't know where I am.' There was such a sense of rage and misery filling the cheap blue Pontiac-because Anna had been lost all her life and was never going to find herself now-that he fell back to sleep. The last thing he saw was an Interstate sign four hundred yards ahead, shifting and luminous in the lights of passing trucks. Then it was daylight, and they were in Massachusetts.

Anna found them a motel room at Mann Hill Beach, not far south of Boston. She seemed to have got over the night's depressions. She stood in the parking lot in the pale sunshine, blinking at the dazzle on the sea and shaking the room keys in Kearney's face until he yawned and stirred himself from the back of the car.

'Come and look!' she urged him. 'Isn't it nice?'

'It's a motel room,' Kearney acknowledged, eyeing with distrust the ruched faux-gingham curtains.

'It's a Boston motel room.'

They were in Mann Hill Beach longer than New York. There was a coast fog each morning, but it burnt off early and for the rest of the day everything was bleached out in clear winter sunshine. At night, they could see the lights of Provincetown across the bay. No one came near them. At first Kearney searched the room every couple of hours and would sleep only with the headboard lamp on. Eventually he relaxed. Anna, meanwhile, wandered up and down the beach, collecting with a kind of aimless enthusiasm the items the sea washed up; or drove the Pontiac carefully into Boston, where she ate little meals in Italian restaurants. 'You should come with me,' she said. 'It's like a holiday. It would do you good.' Then, examining herself in the mirror: 'I've got fat, haven't I? Am I too fat?'

Kearney stayed in the room with the TV on and the sound turned down-a habit he had picked up from Briar: Tate-or listened to a local radio station which specialised in music from the 1980s. He quite liked this, because it made him feel convalescent, half asleep. Then one night they played the old Tom Waits song 'Downtown Train'.

He had never even liked it; but with the first chord, he was flung so completely back into an earlier version of himself that a terrible puzzlement came over him. He couldn't understand how he had aged so savagely, or how he came to be in a motel room with someone he didn't know, someone he had yet to meet, a woman older than himself who, when he touched her thin shoulder, looked sideways at him and smiled. Tears sprang into his eyes. It was only a moment of confusion, but it was carnivorous, and he sensed that by acknowledging it he had allowed it in. Thereafter it would follow him as relentlessly as the Shrander. It would always be waiting to spring out on him. Perhaps in a way it was the Shrander, and it would eat him moment to moment if he didn't do something. So the next morning he got up before Anna was awake and drove the Pontiac into Boston.

There, he bought a Sony handicam. He spent some time searching for the kind of soft plastic-covered wire gardeners use; but found a carbon-steel chefs knife quite easily. On an impulse he went to Beacon Hill, where he picked up two bottles of Montrachet. On his way back to the car he stood for a moment on the south side of the Charles River Basin looking across at MIT, then on an impulse tried to phone Brian Tate. No answer. Back at the motel, Anna was sitting on the bed naked with her feet tucked up, crying. Ten o'clock in the morning and she had already pinned notes to the doors and walls. Why are you anxious? they said, and: Never do more than you can. They were like beacons for a bad sailor, someone lost even in familiar straits. There was a faint smell of vomit in the bathroom, which she had tried to disguise by spraying perfume about. She looked thinner already. He put his arm round her shoulders.

'Cheer up,' he said.

'You could have told me you were going.'

Kearney held up the Sony. 'Look! Let's walk on the beach.'

'I'm not speaking to you.'

But Anna loved to be filmed. The rest of the day, while seabirds flickered over the shallows or hung like kites above the beach, she ran, sat, rolled, posed looking out to sea, against the white sand in the coastal clarity of light. 'Let me look!' she insisted. 'Let me look!' Then screams of laughter as the images poured like a stream of jewels across the little monitor. She wouldn't wait to see them on the TV. She had the impatience of a fourteen-year-old-that life had not allowed her to remain fourteen, she could sometimes imply, was her special tragedy.

'Here's something you don't know,' she said. They sat for a moment on a dune, and she told him about the Mann Hill Sea Monster-

November 1970: three thousand pounds of rotting flesh is washed on to the Massachusetts sand. Crowds gather all the next day, motoring up from Providence and down from Boston. Parents stare, startled by the blubbery flippers. Kiddies dart and dash up close enough to frighten themselves. But the thing is too decayed ever to be identified; and though its bone structure resembles that of a plesiosaur, consensus has it that the gale has brought in nothing more exotic than the remains of a basking shark. In the end, everyone goes home, but the arguments continue for thirty years-

'I bet you didn't know that!' said Anna, leaning back against Kearney's chest and encouraging him to put his arms around her. 'Though you'll say you did.' She yawned and looked out over the bay, which was darkening like the fine crust on a blob of mercury. 'I'm tired out, but in such a nice way.'

'You should go to bed early,' he said.

That evening she drank most of the wine, laughed a lot and took off her clothes, then fell asleep suddenly on the bed. Kearney pulled the covers over her, drew the faux-gingham curtains, and plugged the handicam into the TV. He turned off the lights and for a while ran idly through the stuff he had taken on the beach. He rubbed his eyes. Anna snored suddenly, said something indistinct. The last of the handicam images, ill-lit and grainy-looking, showed her in the corner of the room. She had got as far as unbuttoning her jeans. Her breasts were already bare, and she was turning her head as if Kearney had just spoken to her, her eyes wide, her mouth sweet but tired with acceptance, as if she already knew what was going to happen to her.

He froze that image on the screen, found a pair of scissors and cut two or three lengths of the wire he had bought that morning. These, he placed close to hand on the bedside table. Then he took off his clothes, stripped the chefs knife out of its plastic wrap, pulled back the bedclothes and looked down at her. She lay curled up, with one arm placed loosely round her knees. Her back and shoulders were as thin and unmuscled as a child's, the spine prominent and vulnerable. Her face, in profile, had a sharp, hollo wed-out look, as if sleep was no rest from the central puzzle of being Anna. Kearney stood above her, hissing through his teeth, mainly in anger at the things that had led her here, led him here. He was about to start when he thought he would throw the Shrander's dice, just to be sure.

She must have heard them tumbling on the bedside table, because when he turned back she was awake and looking up at him, dull and fractious with sleep, her breath sour from the wine. Her eyes took in the knife, the wire, Kearney's unaccustomed erection. Unable to understand what was happening, she reached up with one hand and tried to pull him down towards her.

'Are you going to fuck me now?' she whispered.

Kearney shook his head, sighed.

'Anna, Anna,' he said, trying to pull away.

'I knew,' she said, in a different voice. 'I always knew you'd do it in the end.'

Kearney detached himself gently. He put the knife back on the bedside table. 'Kneel up,' he whispered. 'Kneel up.'

She knelt up awkwardly. She seemed confused.

'I've still got my knickers on.'

'Shh.'

Kearney held her with his hand. She moved against him, made a small noise and began to come immediately.

'I want you to come!' she said. 'I want you to come too!'

Kearney shook his head. He held her there quietly in the night until she buried her face in the pillow and stopped trying to control herself. He fetched the bottle of wine and gave her half a glassful and they lay on the bed and watched the television. First Anna on the beach, then Anna undressing, while the camera moved slowly down one side of her body and up the other; then, as she grew bored, a CNN news segment. Kearney turned the sound up just in time to hear the words '… Kefahuchi Tract, named after its discoverer.' Flaring across the screen in colours that couldn't be natural appeared some cosmic object no one could understand. It looked like nothing much. A film of rosy gas with a pinch of brighter light at its centre.

'It's beautiful,' Anna said, in a shocked voice.

Kearney, sweating suddenly, turned the sound down.

'Sometimes I think this is all such bollocks,' he said.

'It is beautiful, though,' she objected.

'It doesn't look like that,' Kearney told her. 'It doesn't look like anything. It's just data from some X-ray telescope. Just some numbers, massaged to make an image. Look around,' he told her more quietly. 'That's all anything is. Nothing but statistics.' He tried to explain quantum theory to her, but she just looked bemused. 'Never mind,' he said. 'It's just that there isn't really anything there. Something called decoherence holds the world into place the way we see it: but people like Brian Tate are going to find maths that will go round the end of that. Any day now we'll just go round decoherence on the back of the maths, and all this-' he gestured at the TV, the shadows in the room '-will mean as much to us as it does to a photon.'

'How much is that?'

'Not much.'

'It sounds awful. It sounds undependable. It sounds as if everything will just-' she made a vague gesture '-boil around. Spray about.'

Kearney looked at her.

'It already does,' he said. He raised himself on one elbow and drank some wine. 'Down there it's just disorder,' he was forced to admit. 'Space doesn't seem to mean anything, and that means that time doesn't mean anything.' He laughed. 'In a way that's the beauty of it.'

She said in a small voice, 'Will you fuck me again?'

The next day he managed to get Brian Tate on the phone and ask him, 'Have you seen that crap on TV?'

'Sorry?'

'This X-ray object, whatever it is. I heard someone from Cambridge talking about Penrose and the idea of a singularity without an event horizon, some bollocks like that-'

Tate seemed distracted. 'I haven't heard about any object,' he said. 'Look Michael, I need to talk to you-'

The connection went down. Kearney stared angrily at his phone, thinking of Penrose's definition of the event horizon not as a limitation of human knowledge but as protection against the breakdown of physical laws which might otherwise leak out into the universe. He switched the television on. It was still tuned to CNN. Nothing.

'What's the matter?' asked Anna.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Look, would you mind if we went home?'

He drove the Pontiac into Logan International. Three hours later they were on a standby flight, climbing above the Newfoundland coast, which at that point looked like a skin of mould on the sea. Up they went through a layer of cloud, then broke into glaring sunlight. Anna seemed to have put aside the events of the night. She spent much of the journey staring down at the surface of the clouds, a faint, almost ironical smile on her face; although once she took Kearney's hand briefly and whispered:

'I like it up here.'

But Kearney's mind was on other journeys.

In his second year at Cambridge, he had worked in the mornings, cast cards in his room in the afternoon.

To represent himself, he always chose The Fool.

'We move forward,' Inge had told him before she found someone who would fuck her properly, 'by the deeply undercutting action of desire. As The Fool steps continually off his cliff and into space, so we are presences trying to fill the absence that has brought us forth.' At the time, he had had no idea what she meant by this. He supposed it was some bit of patter she had learned to make things more interesting. But he began with this image of himself in mind: so that each journey would be, in every sense, atrip.

He had to remove The Fool from the deck before the cards could be dealt. Late afternoon, as the light went out of the room, he laid it on the arm of his chair, from which it fluoresced up at him, more an event than a picture.

Through simple rules, a cast of the cards determined the journey that would be based upon it. For instance: if the card turned up was a Wand, Kearney would go north only if the trip was to take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up was a Knight. Further rules, whose clauses and counter-clauses he intuited with each cast and recast of the cards, covered the choice of south, west and east; of destination; even of the clothes he would wear.

He never cast the cards once the journey had started. There was too much to occupy him. Whenever he looked up there was something new in the landscape. Gorse spilled down the side of a steep little hill with a farm on top. Factory chimneys dissolved in a blaze of sun he couldn't look into. A newspaper opened suddenly just down the carriage, sounding like the spatter of rain on a window. Between each event his reverie poured itself, as seamless as golden syrup. He wondered what the weather would be like in Leeds or Newcastle, turned to the Independent to find out, read: 'Global economy likely to remain subdued.' Suddenly, he noticed the wristwatch of the woman sitting across the aisle. It was made of plastic, with a dial transparent to its own works, so that, in the complexity of the greenish, flickering cogs, your eye lost the position of the hands!

What was he looking for? All he knew was that the clean yellow front of an Intercity train filled him with excitement.

Kearney worked in the morning. In the afternoon he cast the Tarot. At weekends he made journeys. Sometimes he saw Inge around the town. He told her about the cards; she touched his arm with a kind of rueful affection. She was always pleasant, though a little puzzled. 'It's just a bit of fun,' she would repeat. Kearney was nineteen years old. Mathematical physics was opening to him like a flower, revealing his future inside. But the future wasn't quite enough. By following the journeys as they fell out, he believed then, he would open for himself what he thought of as a 'fifth direction'. It would lead to the real Gorselands, perhaps; it would enact those dreams of childhood, when everything had been filled with promise, and predestination, and light.

'Michael!'

Kearney stared around him, uncertain for a moment where he was. Light will transform anything: a plastic drinking glass full of mineral water, the hairs on the back of your hand, the wing of an airliner thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic. All these things can be redeemed and become for a time essentially themselves. The cabin crew had begun to run up and down the aisles, emptying the seatback trays. Shortly afterwards the engines throttled up and then down again, as the aircraft banked and slipped down into the cloud. Vapour roiled in the wingtip turbulence, then the runway was visible, and the illuminated day transformed itself suddenly into the wet, windswept spaces of London Heathrow.

'We're landing!' said Anna excitedly.

She clutched his upper arm and stared out of the window. 'We're landing!'

In the end all the journeys had led to, of course, was the Shrander. The Shrander had been waiting for him, all along, to catch up.