Light

25 Swallowed by the God

Michael and Anna Kearney, with their English accents, careful clothes and slightly puzzled air, drove north from New York City again. This time they were in no hurry. Kearney rented a little grey BMW from an uptown dealer, and they dawdled north into Long Island, then, back on the mainland, followed the coastline up into Massachusetts.

They stopped to look at anything that caught their eye, anything the highway signs suggested might be of interest. There wasn’t much, unless you counted the sea. Kearney, with the air of a man suddenly able to accept his own past, browsed the flea markets and thrift stores of every town they passed through, unearthing used books, ancient videotapes and CD remasterings of albums he had once liked but had never been able to acknowledge in public. These had titles like The Unforgettable Fire and The Hounds of Love. Anna looked at him sidelong, amused: puzzled. They ate three times a day, often in waterfront fish restaurants, and though Anna put on weight, she no longer complained. They stayed a night here, a night there, avoiding motels, seeking instead the picturesque bed-and-breakfast offered by retired lipstick lesbians or middle-aged brokers fleeing the consequences of the Great Bull Market. Genuine English marmalade. Views of gulls, tidewrack, upturned dories. Clean and seaside places.

In this roundabout way they came again to Monster Beach, where Kearney got them a clapboard cottage facing the ocean across a narrow road and some dunes. It was as bare inside as the beach, with uncurtained windows, scrubbed wooden floors, and bunches of dried thyme hanging in corners. Outside, a few shreds of pale blue paint clung to the grey boards in the onshore winds.

“But we’ve got TV,” Anna said. “And mice.” Later she said: “Why are we here?”

Kearney wasn’t sure how to answer that.

“We’re hiding, I suppose.”

At night he still dreamed of Brian Tate and the white cat, melting like tallow in the foetid heat of the Faraday cage: but now he saw them increasingly in situations that made no sense. Taking up bizarre formal seated postures, they toppled away from him against a fundamental blackness. The cat, though it looked exactly like an ornament on a shelf, was as big as the man. (This curious detail of scale, the dream’s comment upon itself, caused Kearney a rush of misery—strengthless, stark, unbelievably depressing.) Still toppling, they became smaller and smaller, to vanish from sight, gesticulating hieratically, against a background of slowly exploding stars and nebulae.

Compared to this, the death of Valentine Sprake, though it lost in memory nothing of its grotesqueness, had begun to seem like a side-issue.

“We’re hiding,” Kearney repeated.

During his third year at Cambridge, before he met Anna, or murdered anyone, he had glanced into a stationer’s window one day on his way into Trinity College. Inside was a display of engraved wedding cards which, as he walked past it, seemed for a moment to merge indistinguishably with the discarded bus tickets and ATM receipts which littered the pavement at his feet. The inside and the outside, he saw, the window display and the street, were only extensions of one another.

He was still making journeys under the auspices of the Tarot cards. Two or three days later, somewhere between Portsmouth and Charing Cross, his train was delayed first by repair works along the line then by a fault in one of its power cars. Kearney dozed, then woke abruptly. The train wasn’t moving and he had no idea where he was, though it must be a station: passengers prowled outside the windows in the bitter cold, among them two clergymen with that uniform whiteness of hair which has been lost to the laity. He fell asleep again, to dream briefly of the lost pleasures of Gorselands, then woke suddenly in the horrified certainty that he had called out in his sleep. The whole carriage had heard him. He was twenty years old, but his future was clear. If he continued to travel like this he would become someone who made noises in his sleep on the London express: a middle-aged man with bad teeth and a cloth briefcase, head resting uncomfortably in the corner of the seat back as his mind unravelled like a pullover and everything became illegible to him.

That was the last of his epiphanies. By its light the Tarot, generator of epiphanies, looked like a trap. It looked like the drabbest of careers. Journeys—perhaps infinite numbers of them—remained nested within it like fractal dimensions: but the medium had become as transparent to him as the stationer’s window, and they were too easy to unpack. He was twenty years old, and the clean yellow front of an Intercity train, rushing towards the platform in the sunlight, no longer filled him with excitement. He had slept in too many overheated rooms, eaten in too many station cafés. He had waited for too many connections.

He was ready, without knowing it, for the next great transition of his life.

“Are we hiding?” Anna said.

“Yes.”

She came and put herself in front of him, close to, so that he could feel the heat from her skin.

“Are you sure?”

Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps he was waiting. He sat out there on Monster Beach each night after she had gone to sleep. If he expected his nemesis, he was disappointed: for once it was nowhere near. Something in that relationship had changed forever. For the first time since their original encounter, Kearney—though he shook with fear upon confronting the idea—was encouraging the Shrander to catch up. Did he feel it stop? Turn its head, as intelligently as a bird, to listen for him now? Did it wonder why he was trailing his coat?

Out there at night he hadn’t much else to do but wait, and watch the ocean waves go in and out beneath the hard stars. Cold offshore winds picked up the sand and trickled it, hissing, between the marram grass on the dunes. There was a shivering luminescence. Kearney had a sense of things as endless: in this scheme the beach became a metaphor for some other transitional site or boundary, a beach at the edge of which lapped the whole universe. What kinds of monsters might wash up on a beach like that? More than the rotten, devolved carcass of a basking shark; more than the plesiosaur for which it had been so briefly and headily mistaken in 1970. Most nights he would go back into the cottage and take out the pocket drive containing Brian Tate’s last data. Most nights he turned it over for a minute or two in his hands in the cold blue light of the TV screen, then put it away again. Once, he got out his laptop and connected the drive to it, though he switched neither of them on, going instead into the bedroom where he got fully clothed into bed beside Anna and placed the palm of his hand against her sex until she half-woke and groaned.

By day he played those old records, or sifted through the TV channels looking for anything that passed for science news. Everything seemed to amuse him. Anna didn’t know what to make of it. One morning at breakfast she asked him:

“Will you kill me, do you suppose?”

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “Not now.” Then he said, “I don’t know.”

She put her hand over his.

“You will, you know,” she said. “You won’t be able to stop yourself in the end.”

Kearney stared out of the window at the ocean.

“I don’t know.”

She took away her hand and kept herself to herself all morning. Equivocation always made her puzzled and, he thought, angry. It had to do with her childhood. Her problem with life was really the same as his: not giving it much credit, she had sought something which seemed more demanding. But there was more to what was happening than that. They’d driven themselves past the norms of their relationship, they had no idea what to make of each other. He didn’t want her to be healthy. She didn’t want him to be reliable or good-natured. They paced around one another by night, looking for openings, looking for less ordinary attitudes to force on one another. Anna was good at it. She surprised him by inviting him, off the back of one of those brilliant, vulnerable smiles of hers:

“Would you like to put your cock inside me?”

They had taken the patchwork quilt off the bed and arranged it in front of the hearth, where driftwood was burning down to pure white ash. Anna, almost as white, lay half on her side in the firelight. He looked down thoughtfully at the hollows and shadows of her body.

“No,” he told her. “I don’t think I would.”

She bit her lip and turned her back.

“What’s the matter with me?”

“You never wanted it,” he said cautiously.

“I did want it,” she said. “I wanted it from the beginning, but it was easy to see you didn’t. Half the girls at Cambridge knew. All you’d do was wank them off, and you never even came yourself. Inge Neumann—the girl with the Tarot cards?—was quite puzzled about it.” At this he looked so mortified she laughed. “At least I got you to come,” she said.

The only reprisal he had was to tell her about Gorselands.

“You would never see the house from the road,” he said. He leaned forward, anxious with the effort of imagining it all. “It was so well hidden. Only trees thick with ivy, a few yards of mossy driveway, the nameplate.” In the grounds, everything was cool and shadowy except where the sun struck through onto a lawn like a broad pool. “It looked so real.” The same light struck through into a third floor room, where, in the heat under the roof, it was always late afternoon and there was always a deep, inturned breathing sound, like the breath of someone who has lost all consciousness of themselves. “Then my cousins would arrive and begin taking their clothes off.” He laughed. “That’s what I imagined, anyway,” he said. When Anna looked puzzled, he said: “I would watch them and masturbate.”

“But this wasn’t real?”

“Oh no. It was just a fantasy.”

“Then I don’t—”

“I had nothing to do with them in life.” He had never once approached them in life. They had seemed too energetic, too brutal. “The Gorselands fantasy spoilt everything for me. When I got to Cambridge I couldn’t do anything.”

He shrugged.

“I don’t know why,” he admitted. “I just couldn’t forget it. The promise of it.”

She stared at him.

“But that’s so exploitative,” she said, “using other people for something that only ever goes on inside you.”

“I ran away from the things I wanted—” he tried to explain.

“No,” she said. “That’s awful.”

She took the quilt by one corner and dragged it back into the bedroom. He heard the bed creak as she flung herself down on it. He felt abashed, caved-in. He said miserably, at least half-believing himself:

“I always thought the Shrander was my punishment for that.”

“Go away.”

“You used me,” he said.

“I didn’t. I never did.”