Empty Space

‘Other people think they hear a voice,’ Case said, ‘ too far away to make out words. Or they smell something, maybe perfume. We think everyone’s trying to describe the same sensation, but so far no one’s got near enough to find out. You’ve done better than most.’

‘Before, there was some kind of paste coming out of her mouth?’

‘That’s on and off,’ Case said. As for the RF transmission, he added, it was very low power. It had a very local reach. ‘If she’s hooked up with anything, it’s already arrived. It’s in the maze.’

‘Jesus, Case. Do we have any idea at all where she came from?’

Case looked amused.

‘No,’ he said. ‘One other thing: sometimes there’s a convulsion. She dribbles — we can’t collect any of it, whatever it is — and there’s a lot of shifting and partial fading. Just for a moment she looks like a much older woman. Nothing’s finished here.’

NINETEEN Anyone Can Make a Mistake

‘Look at all these women,’ Anna Waterman said.

Nine in the morning, and the radiography reception area at St Narcissus, Farringdon was full of them, their anxiety expressed as a tendency to text. Their thumbs brushed the keys of their phones at ferocious speeds; they weren’t going to look up, in case that meant admitting something about their predicament. The reception area helped. It was less a waiting room than a stylised version of one — a quiet postmodern whimsy about lines of chairs against a wall — featuring upholstery in calm warm shades of blue-grey, uplighters like white porcelain cups, clean little round tables piled with the terrestrial editions of property and gossip magazines which no one read any more. Framed on the walls were silhouettes of a cat, which, when you looked at them in a certain way, proved to resemble 2-dimensional slices through the animal, a joke cooked up between the radiologists and St Narcissus’ artist-in-residence. But underneath the joke everything it referred to remained, and when you looked up there was a stain on the ceiling tiles, shaped, according to your mood, either like the map of a distant island or a section through someone’s tumour.

‘That,’ said Anna, who hated hospitals, ‘is the giveaway.’

Marnie laughed.

‘I quite like the uplighters,’ she said, then: ‘Mum, I’ve just got to send a text.’

‘No one can like uplighters, surely?’

‘Mum —’

The receptionist interrupted them. ‘It’s an IUV appointment, isn’t it?’ he shouted at Anna.

‘Excuse me?’ Anna said. ‘I’m not the patient.’

‘You’ve had your kidneys done, dear, haven’t you? Last week? Now look, why don’t you just read this leaflet for me while you wait?’

‘Why? Can’t you read it yourself?’ She glanced at the leaflet, made out the words, ‘Please attend promptly at the Radiology reception desk,’ and repeated with ominous clarity, leaving plenty of space between the words: ‘I’m not the patient.’

During the exchange that followed, Marnie’s scan was called. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promised. ‘Why not sit there, where you can watch the TV?’

‘Don’t you start.’

While she waited, Anna leafed through the magazines. Homes You Can’t Afford offered high definition photography of listed buildings in Surrey and Perthshire. Old issues of Mine and Get brought her the clothes, gadgets and, especially, the elective surgeries of the rich. The eight-year-old male heir to one of the bigger hedge-fund operations of the 2010s had persuaded the family surgeons to fit him with the uterus and womb of ‘an unknown East Asian donor’ for a month; while his mother, upon having her skin genetically modified to produce downy feathers a calculated charcoal-grey colour, announced with satisfaction that she had ‘achieved the look she had always wanted’, as if she’d done the procedures herself at home. She looked a little like a Porsche. Mother and son smiled languidly out of the papagraphs, thoroughly warmed by themselves. September’s Watchtower, meanwhile, promised Comfort For The Elderly. Anna stared at it with dislike. Then, because she had been awake all night, she fell asleep and dreamed about sex. Marnie woke her not long later, and they went across the road to a branch of Carluccio’s to drink cioccolata calda, ‘nun’s revenge’, a favourite of Marnie’s since she was eight. Anna ordered an almond croissant, but instead of almond paste it turned out to have a kind of thin, rather unpleasant custard in it.

‘Well, I’m glad that’s over,’ Marnie said. She put her hand on Anna’s. ‘Thanks for coming with me,’ she said. ‘Really.’

‘Just remind me what kind of scan it was?’

Marnie took her hand away. She looked despondent. ‘You might at least try and keep up with my life.’

‘I think you probably told me but I forgot.’

‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘I don’t feel as if you have any kind of grip on things.’

‘If you’re still upset about the bathroom —’

‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

‘Marnie, anyone can make a mistake.’

‘It isn’t the bathroom.’

‘Well then what?’

Marnie turned away and looked out of the window. ‘I’m ill and you pick a quarrel with the receptionist.’

‘He was patronising me.’

‘I’m ill,’ Marnie said stubbornly. ‘I wouldn’t have gone for a scan if I felt well.’

‘I thought you said it was nothing.’

‘It is nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. But that’s not the point. I tell you not to worry and you just accept that?’ Marnie made a dismissive gesture. Suddenly she pushed back her chair. ‘We don’t seem to live in the same world any more, Anna,’ she said. She got up and walked out.

For some time after she had gone, Anna sat at the table with her hands in her lap. She didn’t know what to do or think next. Outside the huge windows of Carlucci’s, rain poured down through the sunshine, turning Farringdon — for the first and last time, you imagined — into a romantic film of itself. People hurried by, laughing; Anna watched them until the rain stopped. Across the road, an optician’s sign blinked and shifted: her eyes followed that. When the coffee machine hissed, her head turned that way. She listened to the people at the table next to her. Other people went in and out of the doors. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind her, laughing and shrieking. People never seem to grow up or change, she thought. After about half an hour, Marnie came back and said she was sorry, and went off again to work. Anna took the tube to Waterloo and was home by midday.

She went out into the garden to have lunch and found that in her absence vegetation had filled the beds at the base of the summerhouse again. It was taller this time. Thick bright green rubbery stems wove about in the sunshine, almost as if they were moving, ending in flowers like trumpets or Tiffany lampshades. At the base of the tangle sprouted those unearthly copper poppies; and on the earth between their stems, gelid organs in rose and pastel blue such as the cat brought in nightly. Small birds flew out of the vegetation, all colours but all single- coloured — birds from a child’s rag book, they peeped at Anna with their heads on one side. The summerhouse itself seemed to fall away upward in a distorted perspective, the parts of it leaning together as if they had been propped there loosely and abandoned, dilapidated yellow lapboard like a drawing of itself, looming against a sky too blue. She dragged open the door like someone determined to get to the bottom of things, but inside it was just a shed in anyone’s garden — dusty, hot, full of slowly bursting boxes, layered spiderwebs and a kind of archaeological time. Gardening things. Unused things. Things of Tim’s or Marnie’s, markers of the fads and bad decisions of long ago: a rolled poster here, too brittle to unroll ever again; there a small lay figure, its limbs arranged to represent a Degas dancer. Suddenly she was bloody sick of it. She could no more manage it than Marnie’s mystifying behaviour at Carlucci’s. She took her lunch back to the house, binned it and went to the de Spencer Arms instead. There she came across the boy with the dogs, without his dogs. He was sitting at a table as far away from the building itself