Light

7 The Pursuit of God

When Michael Kearney woke it was deep night outside. The lights were off. He could hear someone breathing harshly in the room.

“Who’s there?” he said sharply. “Lizzie?”

The noise stopped.

A single minimally furnished space with straw-coloured hardwood floors, galley kitchen, and a bedroom on the second floor, the apartment belonged to his second wife Elizabeth, who had moved back to the US at the end of the marriage. From its upper windows you could see across Chiswick Eyot to Castelnau. Rubbing his face, Kearney got out of the armchair and went upstairs. It was empty up there, with a drench of streetlight across the disordered bed and a faint smell of Elizabeth’s clothes which had remained to haunt him after she left. He went back down again and switched on the lights. A disembodied head was balanced on the back of the Heals sofa. It was wasted and ill-looking. All the flesh had retreated to the salient points of its face, leaving the bone structure prominent and bare beneath a greyish skin. He wasn’t sure what it belonged to, or even what sex it was. As soon as it saw him it began swallowing and wetting its mouth urgently, as if it hadn’t enough saliva to speak.

“I can’t begin to describe the grudgingness of my life!” it shouted suddenly. “Ever feel that, Kearney? Ever feel your life is threadbare? Ever feel it’s like this worn-out curtain which barely hides all the rage, the jealousy, the sense of failure, all those self-devouring ambitions and appetites that have never dared show themselves?”

“For God’s sake,” Kearney said, backing away.

The head smiled contemptuously.

“It was a cheap enough curtain in the first place. Isn’t that what you feel? Just like the ones at these windows, made of some nasty orange stuff with a fur of age on it the day after it was hung.”

Kearney tried to speak, but found that his own mouth had dried up.

Eventually he said: “Elizabeth never hung curtains.”

The head licked its lips. “Well let me tell you something, Kearney: it didn’t hide you anyway! Behind it that horrible thin body of yours has been writhing and posturing for forty-odd years, laughing and making faces (oh yes, making faces, Kearney!), shaking its huge Beardsleyesque cock about, anything to be noticed. Anything to be acknowledged. But you won’t look, will you? Because pull that curtain back once and you’d be burned to a crisp by the sheer repressed energy of it.”

The head gazed exhaustedly around. After a moment or two it said in a quieter voice:

“Ever feel like that, Kearney?”

Kearney considered.

“No.”

Valentine Sprake’s face seemed to fluoresce palely from within. “No?” he said. “Oh well.”

He got up and came out from behind the sofa where he had been crouching, an energetic-looking man perhaps fifty years old, with stooped shoulders, sandy orange hair and a goatee beard. His colourless eyes were wilful and absentminded at the same time. He had on a brown fleece jacket too long for him, tight old Levi’s which made his thighs look thin and bandy, Merrell trail boots. He smelled of rolling tobacco and generic whisky. In one hand—its knuckles enlarged by years of work or illness—he held a book. He looked down at it in a startled way, then offered it to Kearney.

“Look at this.”

“I don’t want it.” Kearney backed away. “I don’t want it.”

“More fool you,” said Valentine Sprake. “I got it off the shelf there.” He tore out two or three pages of the volume—which, Kearney now saw, was Elizabeth’s beloved thirty-year-old Penguin Classics edition of Madame Bovary—and began stuffing them in different pockets of his coat. “I can’t be bothered with people who don’t know their own minds.”

“What do you want from me?”

Sprake shrugged. “You phoned me,” he said. “As I heard it.”

“No,” said Kearney. “I got some sort of answer service, but I didn’t leave a message.”

Sprake laughed.

“Oh yes you did. Alice remembered you. Alice quite fancies you.” He rubbed his hands busily. “How about a cup of tea?”

“I’m not even sure you’re here,” Kearney said, looking anxiously at the sofa. “Did you understand anything you were saying over there?” Then he said: “It’s caught up with me again. In the Midlands, two days ago. I thought you might know what to do.”

Sprake shrugged.

“You already know what to do,” he suggested.

“I’m sick of doing it, Valentine.”

“You’d better get out, then. I doubt you’ll finish with a whole skin whatever you do.”

“It doesn’t work anymore. I don’t know if it ever worked.”

Sprake gave him a small colourless smile. “Oh, it works,” he said. “You’re just a wanker.” He held up one hand in the pretence that Kearney might take offence. “Only joking. Only joking.” He kept smiling for a moment or two, then added: “Mind if I roll a cigarette?” On the inside of his left wrist he had a homemade tattoo, the word FUGA, in faded blue-black ink. Kearney shrugged and went into the galley. While Kearney made the tea Sprake strode about smoking nervously and picking pieces of tobacco off his bottom lip. He switched the lights off, and waited with a satisfied air for the apartment to fill with streetlight instead.

At one point he said, “The Gnostics were wrong, you know.” Then, when Kearney didn’t reply:

“There’s a mist coming up over the river.”

After that there was quite a long pause. Kearney heard two or three small movements, as of someone removing a book from a shelf; then an intake of breath. “Listen to this—” Sprake began, but fell silent immediately. When Kearney came out of the kitchen, the street door was open and the apartment was empty. Two or three books lay on the floor, surrounded by torn-out pages which looked like wings. Onto the empty white wall above the sofa, in a bright parallelogram of sodium light, something outside was projecting the shadow of an enormous beaked head. It looked nothing like the head of a bird. “Christ,” said Kearney, his heart beating so hard he could feel it rocking his upper body. “Christ!” The shadow began to turn, as if its owner, hanging in the air two storeys above a street in Chiswick, two in the morning, was turning to look at him. Or worse, as if it wasn’t a shadow at all.

“Jesus Christ, Sprake, it’s here!” Kearney shouted, and ran out of the apartment. He could hear Sprake’s footsteps thudding on the pavement somewhere ahead of him; but he never caught him up.

Central London, 3 a.m.

Fractals spilled across icy blue displays, developing into something that resembled the jerky frame-by-frame slow motion of a much earlier medium. Brian Tate rubbed his eyes and stared. Behind him, the suite was dark. It smelled of junk food, cold coffee. The male cat was sniffing about in a litter of discarded polystyrene cups and burger cartons around Tate’s feet. The female sat quietly on his shoulder, watching with a kind of companionable complicity the mathematical monster unspooling across the screens in front of them. Every so often she dabbed out a paw, mewing impatiently, as if to draw Tate’s attention to something he had missed. She knew where the action was. Tate took off his glasses and put them on the desk in front of him. Even at these speeds there was nothing to see.

Or almost nothing. At Los Alamos, bored—though he would never have admitted it to anyone—by the constant talk about physics and money, he had spent most of his free time in his room, switching restlessly from TV channel to TV channel with the sound turned down. This led him to think about choice. The moment of choice, he thought, could be located very exactly as one image flickered, broke and was replaced by the next. If you levered things apart, if you could get into the exact moment of transition, what would you find? Entertaining himself with the fantasy of an unknown station—something more watchable than reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—transmitting into the gap, into the moment of choice, he had tried to record a series of channel changes on the VCR and play them back in stop-frame. This had proved to be impossible.

He reached back to stroke the cat’s ears. She evaded him, jumped down onto the floor, where she hissed at the male until he retreated under Tate’s chair.

Tate, meanwhile, picked up the telephone and tried Kearney’s home number. There was no answer.

He left another message.