Light

19 Chimes of Freedom

After he left the laboratory, Michael Kearney was afraid to stop moving.

It began to rain. It got dark. Everything seemed to be surrounded by the pre-epileptic corona, a flicker like bad neon. A metallic taste filled his mouth. At first he ran around the streets, reeling with nausea, clutching park railings as he passed.

Then he blundered into Russell Square station, and thereafter took tube trains at random. The evening rush had just begun. Commuters turned to watch him squat in the crook of a dirty tiled passage or the corner of a platform, his shoulders hunched over protectively as he shook the Shrander’s dice in the basket of his clasped hands; turned away quickly again when they saw his face or smelled the vomit on his clothes. After two hours in the Underground system his panic diminished: he found it hard to stop moving, but at least his heart rate had decreased and he could begin to think. On a swing back through the centre, he had a drink at the Lymph Club, kept it down, ordered a meal he couldn’t eat. After that he walked a little more, then caught a Jubilee Line train to Kilburn, where Valentine Sprake lived at the end of a long street of inexpressive three-storey Victorian stock-brick houses, the rubbish-choked basement areas and boarded-up windows of which attracted a floating population of drug dealers, art students, economic refugees from the former Yugoslavia.

Political posters clung to the lampposts. None of the stained and rusty cars half up on the pavement among the wastepaper and dogshit were less than ten years old. Kearney knocked at Sprake’s door, once, twice, then a third time. He stepped back and with the rain falling into his eyes called up at the front of the building. “Sprake? Valentine?” His voice echoed off down the street. After a minute something drew his attention to one of the top-floor windows. He craned his neck to look, but all he could see was a piece of grey net curtain and the reflection of the streetlight on the dirty glass.

Kearney put his hand out to the door. It swung inward, as if in response. Kearney stepped back suddenly.

“Jesus!” he said. “Jesus!”

For a moment he had thought he saw a face peering round the door at him. It was smeared with streetlight, lower than you would expect to see a face, as if quite a young child had been sent to answer his knock.

Inside, nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s, and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet. Low-wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of light before they plunged the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from the second floor rooms. Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night.

Valentine Sprake lay under a wash of fluorescent light, inside a chalk circle drawn on the bare floorboards of one of the upper rooms. He was sprawled up against an armchair, his head thrown back and to one side, as if he was at that moment being shot. He was naked, and he seemed to have covered himself with some sort of oil. It glistened in the sparse ginger hair between his legs. His mouth had fallen open, and the expression on his face was at once pained and restful. He was dead. His sister Alice sat on a broken sofa outside the circle, her legs out in front of her. Kearney remembered her in adolescence, slow-moving and vague. She had grown into a tall woman of thirty or so, with black hair, very white skin, and a faint downy moustache. Her skirt was drawn up to reveal white, fleshy thighs, and she was staring across Sprake’s head at a picture on the opposite wall. From this strange cheap piece of religious art, a Gethsemane rendered stereoscopically in greens and bluish greys, the face and upper body of Christ yearned out into the room in a wrenched but determined gesture of embrace.

“Alice?” said Kearney.

Alice Sprake made a noise like “Yoiy. Yoiy yoiy.”

Kearney held his hand over his mouth and went a little further into the room.

“Alice, what happened here?”

She stared at him blankly; then down at herself; then back up at the picture on the wall. She began to masturbate absentmindedly, working her fingers into her groin.

“Christ,” said Kearney.

He took another look at Sprake. Sprake was clutching an old electric kettle in one hand and a pamphlet edition of Yeats’s Hodos Chameleontos in the other. A moment before, perhaps, he had been holding them up with his arms outspread in the hieratic gesture of a figure on a Tarot card. The floor in front of him was littered with objects that seemed to have fallen out of his lap as he died. Seashells, the skull of a small mammal: Serbian gypsy ornaments which had belonged to his mother. There was a feeling that something else was going to happen in the room. Despite the finality of what had already taken place, something else could easily happen.

Alice Sprake said: “He was good boy.”

She groaned loudly. The broken springs of the sofa creaked and were silent. After a moment she got to her feet and smoothed her skirt down over her thighs. She was six feet tall, Kearney thought, perhaps more. Her great size had a calming effect on him, and she seemed aware of that. She smelled powerfully of sex.

“I will see to this, Mikey,” she said. “But you must go.”

“I came because I needed his help.”

The idea seemed to give her no satisfaction.

“It is your fault that he is like this. Ever since he met you he has been mad. He was going to do wonderful things with his life.”

Kearney stared at her.

“Sprake?” he said in disbelief. “Are you talking about Sprake?” He started to laugh. “The day we met he was a fuck-up in a railway carriage. He did tattoos on himself with a Bic pen.”

Alice Sprake drew herself up.

“He was one of the five most powerful magicians in London,” she said simply. Then she added: “I know what you are afraid of. If you don’t go now I will send it after you.”

“No!” said Kearney.

He had no idea what she might be able to do. He stared panickily from her to the dead man, then ran out of the room, down the stairs and into the street.

Anna was asleep when he let himself back into the flat. She had wound herself in the duvet so that only the top of her head showed, and there were new notes everywhere. Other people’s problems are their own, she had tried to remind herself: You aren’t responsible for other people’s problems.

Kearney went quietly into the back room and began to empty the chest of drawers, stuffing clothes, books, packs of cards and personal items into his Marin courier bag in the dark. The room looked out onto the central well of the block. Kearney hadn’t been in there long when he began to hear voices echoing up from one of the lower floors. It sounded like a man and a woman arguing, but he couldn’t make out any words, only a feeling of loss and threat. He got up off his knees and drew the curtains. The voices seeped in anyway. When he had what he wanted, he tried to zip up the bag. The zip caught. He looked down. The bag and everything in it was covered in a thick soft even layer of dust. This image gave him such a sense of his life draining away that he was filled with terror again. Anna woke up in the other room.

“Michael?” she said. “Is that you? That’s you isn’t it?”

“Go to sleep,” Kearney advised her. “I just came for some things.”

There was a pause while she assimilated this. Then she said:

“I’ll make you a cup of tea. I was just going to make tea but I fell asleep. I was so exhausted I just fell asleep.”

“There’s no need to do that,” he said.

He heard the bed creak as she got up. She came and leaned in the doorway in her long cotton nightdress, yawning and rubbing her face. “What are you doing?” she said. She must have smelt the vomit on the front of his jacket, because she said: “Have you been ill?” She switched the light on suddenly. Kearney made a futile gesture with the bag in his hand. They stood there blinking at each other.

“You’re leaving.”

“Anna,” Kearney said, “it’s for the best.”

“How can you bloody say that!” she shouted. “How can you bloody say it’s for the best?”

Kearney began to speak, then shrugged.

“I thought you were going to stay! Yesterday you said this was good, you said it was good.”

“We were fucking, Anna. I said that was good.”

“I know. I know. It was good.”

“I said it was good fucking you, that’s all,” he said. “That was all I meant.”

She slid down in the doorway and sat with her knees drawn up.

“You let me feel as if you were going to stay.”

“You did that yourself,” Kearney tried to persuade her.

She stared up at him angrily. “You wanted it too,” she insisted. “You practically said as much to me.” She sniffed, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Oh well,” she said. “Men are always so stupid and frightened.” She shivered suddenly. “Is it cold in here? I’m awake now anyway. At least have some tea. It won’t take a minute.”

It took longer. Anna fussed about. She wondered if there was enough milk. She began the washing up, then abandoned it. She left Kearney to finish the tea while she went into the bathroom and ran the taps. After that he heard her rooting about somewhere else in the flat. Drawers opened and closed. “I saw Tim the other day,” she called. This was so transparent Kearney didn’t bother to answer. “He remembered you.” Kearney stood in the kitchen, staring at the things on the shelves and drinking the weak Earl Grey he had made. He kept hold of the courier bag, feeling that if he put it down he would weaken his position. Every so often a wave of anxiety licked over him, starting somewhere deep in the brainstem, as if some very old part of him could detect the Shrander long before Kearney himself heard or saw it.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “Anna?”

He emptied his cup into the sink. When he got to the door she was already there, standing so he couldn’t open it. She had dressed for going out, in a big cable-knit cardigan and fake Versace skirt, and there was a bag at her feet. She saw him looking down at it. “If you can go I can go too,” she said. Kearney shrugged and reached over her shoulder for the knob of the Yale lock.

“Why don’t you trust me?” she said, as if it was already established that he didn’t.

“It isn’t anything like that.”

“Oh yes it is. I try to help you—”

He made an impatient gesture.

“—only you won’t let me.”

“Anna,” he said quickly, “I help you. You’re a drunk. You’re anorexic. You’re ill most days, and on a good day you can barely walk down the pavement. You’re always in a panic. You barely live in the world we know.”

“You bastard.”

“So how can you help?”

“I’m not letting you go without me,” she said. “I’m not letting you open this door.”

She struggled against him.

“Jesus, Anna.”

He got the door open and pushed past her. She caught up with him on the stairs and held on to the collar of his jacket and wouldn’t let go even when he started to drag her down the stairs.

“I hate you,” she said.

He stopped and stared at her. They were both panting.

“Why are you doing this, then?”

She hit him in the face.

“Because you have no idea!” she shouted. “Because no one else will help you. Because you’re the useless one, the damaged one. Are you so stupid you can’t see that? Are you so stupid?”

She let go of his coat and sat down suddenly. She glanced up at him, then away again. Tears poured down her face. Her skirt had ridden up as she fell, and he found himself staring at her long, thin thighs as if he had never seen her before. When she saw that, she blinked her tears away and pulled the skirt up further. “Christ,” Kearney whispered. He turned her over and pushed her into the cold stone stairs, while she pushed back hard against his hand, sniffing and crying throughout.

When, ten minutes later, he dragged himself away and walked off towards the tube station, she simply followed.

He had met her in Cambridge, perhaps two years after he stole the dice. He was looking for someone to murder, but Anna took him to her room instead. There he sat on the bed while she opened a bottle of wine, showed him photographs of her most recent brush with anorexia, walked nervously about in a long cardigan and nothing else. She told him: “I like you but I don’t want to have sex. Is that all right?” It was all right with Kearney, who—constrained by the Gorselands fantasies and worn out by the evasions he normally had to practise on these occasions—often found himself saying much the same thing. Every time the cardigan fell open thereafter, he gave her a vague smile and looked politely away. This only seemed to make her more nervous. “Will you just sleep next to me?” she begged him when it was time to go. “I really like you but I’m not ready for sex.” Kearney spent an hour stretched out next to her, then, at perhaps three in the morning, left the bed and masturbated violently into the bathroom sink. “Are you all right?” she called in a muffled, sleepy voice.

“You’re so nice,” she said, when he came back. “Hug me.”

He stared at her in the dark. “Were you even asleep?” he said.

“Please.”

She rolled against him. As soon as he touched her, she groaned and pulled away, raising her behind in the air and burying her face in the pillow while he manipulated her with one hand and himself with the other. At first she tried to join in, but he wouldn’t let her touch him. He kept her at the edge of coming, breathing in great sobbing gasps, whimpering into the pillow between each breath. He watched her like this until watching her had made him so hard again his cock hurt. Finally he brought her off with two or three quick little circular rubs and let himself come onto the small of her back. Gorselands had never seemed so close. He had never felt so in control. Engineering that, he supposed, was her way of feeling in control. With her face still in the pillow she said:

“I really didn’t mean to do that right up until I did it.”

“Didn’t you?” said Kearney.

“You’ve made me very sticky.”

“Stay there, stay there,” he ordered her, “don’t move,” and fetched tissue to wipe her dry.

He went everywhere with her after that. He was attracted by her cleverly chosen clothes, sudden bursts of laughter, dissembled narcissism. At nineteen, her fragility was already obvious. She had a confusing relationship with her father—some kind of academic in the north—who had wanted her to attend a university closer to home. “He’s sort of disowned me,” she said, looking up at Kearney with a soft, dawning surprise, as if it had just happened. “Can you understand why anyone would do that?” She had tried to kill herself twice. Her friends, in the way students are, were almost proud of this; they took care of her. Kearney, they intimated fiercely, had responsibilities too. Anna herself seemed only embarrassed: forgotten for a minute, though, she began to waste away. “I don’t think I’m eating much,” she would say helplessly on the telephone. She had the air of someone the simplest levels of whose personality must be held together, hands on, daily.

Kearney was drawn to her by all that (not to say by a species of deep gallantry he detected in her, the presence at some level beneath all these gestures of panic and self-defeat, of a woman determined to have what life her demons would allow). But it was her way of having sex that kept him there. If Kearney wasn’t precisely a voyeur, Anna wasn’t quite an exhibitionist. Neither of them ever knew quite what they were. They were a mystery to one another.

Eventually that in itself would enrage them: but those early encounters were like water in a desert. They married in a register office two days after he got his doctorate—he bought for the occasion a Paul Smith suit. They were together ten years after that. They never had children, though she said she wanted them. He saw her through two stretches of therapy, three more bouts of anorexia, a last, almost nostalgic attempt to do away with herself. She watched him follow the funding from university to university, doing what he called “McScience” for the corporates, keeping track of the new discipline of complexity and emergent properties, all the time staying ahead of the game, the Shrander, the body count. If she suspected anything, she never spoke. If she wondered why they moved so often, she never said. In the end he told her everything one night, sitting on the edge of her bed at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, staring down at her bandaged wrists and wondering how they had come to this.

She laughed and took his hands in hers. “We’re stuck with each other now,” she said, and within the year they were divorced.