Empty Space

you up to here?’

The assistant said she wasn’t up to anything.

Gaines sighed. He opened a pipe to the Aleph project. ‘Get me someone in Containment.’  There was a pause, during  which he considered  the assistant as if deciding not to purchase her. ‘Do you like cake?’ he asked her. ‘I feel like eating cake.’ Before she could think of an answer, the dial-up caught his attention again.

‘I know,’ he said. He listened intently  for thirty-five seconds before interrupting,  ‘Something’s got loose and you fuckers don’t even know what it is!’ To someone else he said, ‘I think it might have been in touch with her.’ This brought a prolonged response that failed to calm his evident anxieties. The assistant went to the window so she could watch people in the street below. ‘Don’t go away,’ Gaines warned her. GlobeTown’s small evening rain was already finished. All along the other side of the street, dub joints and crepe stalls were opening for early business. Later, the port environs would flush themselves into Saudade proper  and these streets would be empty. Until then the girls and boys laughed and kissed in the smell of food and perfume. Neon glowed through the soft renewed air; while, up in the room, Gaines presented his back to the assistant. She stared idly at the pictographs marching along her inside forearm. Sometimes they itched. Sometimes they felt like real things moving under her skin. ‘I don’t know,’ she heard Gaines say. ‘No one knows anything at this time.’ He closed the pipe.

When he turned back to her the first thing he said was:

‘We should let you go after this, but we agreed we don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t make sense for us.’ He smiled. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Do you like cake? All afternoon,  I wanted to eat cake!’ He walked her to a well known patisserie stall, Ou Lu Lou’s, up on the hill by the New Men warrens off Retiro Street, where the sidewalk was crammed with people eating ambient tart, listening to music and drinking small glasses of espresso or aniseed liqueur while the neon scripts and city lights shimmered across the warm air — love messages from  the  distant  all-night  venues along Tupolev and Mirabeau.

‘Look at this! Eclair! Cream  horn!’ Gaines rubbed  his hands together. ‘You look like someone who can eat cake.’

‘I don’t like anything with cream in it,’ the assistant said.

She laughed. Since the  events on  Funene,  she had  felt even more like an impersonation  of herself — of any self. Gaines tried to make her dance. She didn’t know how to dance. The crowd began to look uneasy, and some of them moved away. ‘Come on now!’ Gaines called after them. ‘It’s only fun.’ He asked the remainder, didn’t they think  the assistant  was beautiful? ‘Look at her!’ he said. He drank five or six liqueurs, but didn’t eat any cake after all. Instead he joked with everyone and made sure the assistant had the things she wanted. Later, back in her room, he sat on the bed with his knees apart and his hands loosely clasped between them, and said without preamble:

‘The thing about  life is that  if you get it wrong you can’t go back.’

There were two kinds of people, he said: those who lived their lives in the prolonged moment of panic in which they first realised this — ‘They have no idea where the door is now, let alone how to get it open if they could find it’ and who therefore spent their lives thrashing about in what he called ‘the disorder of hearing it click shut behind them’. The other kind, after a single awful pang, ‘one fast look back’, decide to make the best of whatever happens next. ‘Those people go on,’ he finished: ‘They’re still hoping for something good.’

The assistant did not how to reply. Nothing he said was in her area of expertise. None  of it applied to someone  like her.  She wasn’t sure anyway that he meant her to believe him. In the end she said:

‘Surely we can be anything we want in this world.’

Gaines dismissed an idea so simple. ‘When I got in this game,’ he went on, ‘I had a little daughter.’ He said this as if he was just now discovering it; or as if he was discovering it about someone else. ‘A little girl,’ he said, after a pause; and after another  one, ‘I was twenty years old.’ This in itself seemed to be the story: at any rate, there was no more to tell. It was as if, ever since, he had looked at these facts obliquely — as if he couldn’t see them  but could, with care, make them out as a fairly robust implication of some other data.

He shrugged. ‘Investigate those mystery deaths if you like,’ he suggested, ‘or this Nova Swing rocket: but it’s a team game now. For all of us. Agreed?’ She had no idea who he was talking about. But each liqueur,  she noticed,  had caused his smile to become a little less intense. ‘Always bring the results to me,’ he recommended.  ‘And never, ever say that  word to anyone again.’ The assistant opened her mouth  to agree, but before she could speak he walked straight out through  the window, vanishing the other side, and leaving her with the impression that the view from her room was painted on the glass. As if the world fabric was a style of art to which only Gaines and people like him had the secret.

THIRTEEN Eaten by Dogs

Anna Waterman’s bedroom had what she thought of as a suicide bathroom en suite — extensive mirrors above sink and bath, everything else black faux-marble cladding. The walls matched the floor, and there was no natural light. Uplighters provided enough of an oily yellowish glow to pee by. But switch on the three hundred watts of fluorescents hidden in the ceiling and you had better keep your eyes closed: otherwise you would see — turning  with you when you turned,  wincing and holding its palms up to the cruel radiance — whatever pitiful thing you had become over the years. In a bathroom  that implacable, even the happiest woman would find it easy to let the Jack Daniel’s bottle fall and smash. Display as many bowls of dried rose petals as you like in that kind of bathroom,  but after you’ve changed the peach-coloured  bath sheets and broken  open a new cake of handcut  hemp-oil  soap, you’ll still find yourself arranging the water glass and Temazepam cartons by the sink, or sitting quietly on the too-low lavatory pan, planning where to make the first cut — and cuts will always seem necessary, whatever the financial or emotional climate.

Some part of Anna sought comfort, or familiarity at least, in the suicide bathroom. That part of her welcomed it as a concept as much as a place, a key theory about the world she had held since she was young, a psychic refuge at the very same time as a site of existential terror, something  that would always be there for her: but the part isn’t the whole, and by eight o’ clock on the morning after her swim the rest of her had begun cheerfully demolishing it.

Marnie  found  her there just after lunch, crouched  under  the sink in a cleaning-woman overall, with her hair tied up in a batik scarf.

‘What do you think, then?’ Anna said.

She had emptied the bathroom  of everything that would move and  piled it into  the bedroom.  Patchy success with the marble cladding had encouraged her to lever off one of the larger sections of mirror; this she had dropped from the bedroom window into a flowerbed where it lay, unbroken  except for a chip at one corner, amid the childlike planting of lobelia and ox-eye daisy. The pipes and cavities exposed by these operations,  she had done in gold or silver, according to mood. ‘Later,’ she said, ‘I’ll paint fish on them.  Starfish. Seashells. Bubbles. Those kinds  of things.’ The major surfaces had taken their first coat, dark blue emulsion with enough white in it to suggest a kind of Spanish azure, applied fast with a tray and roller. As soon as it was dry she intended  to put on more white, in dry combed streaks to give the effect of foam. It covered the walls well enough, but the mirrors would need more. ‘I’m planning to keep to these pastelly greens and blues,’ she told Marnie, ‘for everything but the detail.’ For the detail she had laid aside three or four of the smallest brushes she could find, beautiful sablehair modelling points. ‘But also if I can get some light into them, I will.’

Marnie stood in the doorway of the suite, stiffly considering the heaps of bath towels and broken fittings; the carrier bags stuffed with  leaking Moulton-Brown  shower  products;  the  torn  black rubbish sack half full of triangular  shards of marble, none larger than  three  inches on a side. On  the fitted taupe  berber  by the bathroom  door, Anna had prised open every can of paint in the house, from little unused tins of fancy enamel to five litre drums of professional obliterating emulsion. All of this Marnie observed in disbelief. She picked her way over to the open window and stared down at the mirror  in the flowerbed. After a moment she passed one hand over her face and said:

‘Anna, for God’s sake what are you doing?’

‘I’m decorating,  dear. What  does it look like?’ Anna  pushed some hair back under the scarf. ‘You can help if you like.’