seemed vulnerable, illuminated from within. Anna watched him a minute or two, then gathered her clothes and began to get dressed. When she thought the time was right, she said:
‘I’ve got some work I need doing.’
The boy made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. He wasn’t looking for work, he said. He had enough work.
‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked.
It wasn’t much, she said. It was just some painting.
He had enough of that kind of work, the boy said.
‘I need someone to look at my bathroom,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t live far. If you called later in the week, you could do the work I need.’
He moved his shoulder again and kept looking out of the window. ‘Those dogs of mine were company ’til the grey hare got across them.’ Anna, receiving this as ‘grey hair’, had no idea what he meant. ‘That spoiled everything. I could talk to them until then.’ As she was leaving he turned round and said, ‘I’ll come and see you though? I’ll be coming to see you?’
Anna touched his arm and smiled. ‘Put your clothes on,’ she said. ‘It’s cold in here.’
The lane outside had filled with mist, yet if you looked directly upward you could see the stars. Anna turned towards Wyndlesham, walking as briskly as she could. Once or twice she raised her arms in the air or smiled for no reason. She wondered what had really happened to the dogs. Those lovely, lovely animals. Perhaps he’d sold them. Perhaps he’d just grown tired of them. I can’t imagine what Marnie will make of him, she thought: although it’s none of her business. She looked for her phone, couldn’t find it; stopped suddenly, brought both hands to her mouth and laughed. I can’t believe myself, she thought. When she looked back, the bothy seemed to hang without support in the gathering dusk. Everything it represented was history. Since the banking meltdown of 2007, the stable-block itself — built by John Ampney in the late 18th century from locally-sourced brick and pantile and not then intended to house the hunt — had tracked closely the declining economic curve: redevelopment, first as prestige office space, then as a paintball ‘shoot house’; a decade of squatting and abandonment; finally, annexation by the local authority as Kent and Sussex struggled to contain thousands of Chinese economic refugees washing up in the old Cinque Ports; after which it had been allowed to fall down.
At home there were several messages from Marnie — ‘Mum, I‘m trying to call but your mobile is off again. Mum? Mum, please pick up.’ — and one from Helen Alpert reminding Anna of her appointment the next morning. Anna, starving, made baked beans on toast. While the beans were heating up, she walked to and fro eating slices of quince cheese with some cold lentils she had found at the back of the fridge. She swept the old cat up in her arms and squeezed him in a way he had never liked. ‘James, James, oh James,’ she said: ‘What
When she woke, it was late. The cat was out again. She drank a glass of water and went to the garden window. The summerhouse seemed quiet. And yet the dreams she had had! She went out and, standing barefoot on the lawn, worked her toes into the damp turf to wake herself up. ‘James!’ she called. A great beam of off-white light struck out from somewhere behind the house — like the sweep of headlights as a car turns in off the road into your drive, but silent, frozen and prolonged. Or like a huge door opened: light squared-off somehow, sharp-edged, looking for something to reveal, in this case the thousands of cats boiling across the water meadow towards Anna’s home in an alert, silent rush. Every one of them was either black or white. They poured into the garden, parting around the summerhouse, and up towards Anna, of whom they took no more notice than the garden furniture. On and on they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, pouring out of the meadow, pouring away behind the house. Anna, deep in explicatory failure, had no way of placing herself with regard to this event: she did not in any sense know what she felt about it. Now she winced away and tried to climb the garden fence. Now she waded directly into the stream of cats, and stood with tears of pure delight streaming down her face, feeling them flow around her, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell — until suddenly the light turned itself off and the garden was empty again. She stood for a moment wiping her eyes and laughing. Then she went back into the house and left a message with Dr Alpert’s answering service: ‘Helen, I don’t feel I want to carry on with our conversations. I feel as if I would rather take charge of myself again.’
She left a similar message with her daughter. ‘I’m not sure I can explain. I’m just not such hard work for myself as I used to be.’ She searched for something else to say. ‘I saw a lot of cats in the garden this evening!’ Since this didn’t seem to approach the facts, or give any feeling of the rest of her day, she added: ‘And, Marnie, I met someone, but I don’t know if you’ll like him.’
She put the phone down and looked for Michael Kearney’s computer drive. Excavated from the litter at the bottom of her bag, it lay on the kitchen counter like an enchanted egg, its surface rich with wear, magically transforming ordinary reflected domestic light into year upon year of guilt. Anna Waterman had no idea if the old man in South London was really Brian Tate. She would have to accept that her memory of the scandals surrounding Michael’s death and Tate’s downfall would always be clouded; that her struggles with Michael — like her struggles with herself — would grow increasingly meaningless. At a certain age, she now understood, you owe the past nothing except to recognise it as the past. Michael could go to hell, if he wasn’t already there. Tomorrow she would take the pocket drive to Carshalton and, one way or another, relinquish responsibility for whatever data it contained; and that would be that.
TWENTY
Modern Luminescence
‘It came out of nowhere.’
‘Nothing comes out of nowhere.’
‘Ha ha. What is it?’
‘It says “biological content”.’
The tank had been through some recent high-temperature event, after which it pitched into empty space a light minute off the
‘Shine the light.’
Liv Hula shone the light. ‘Out of nowhere!’ she repeated. ‘I nearly flew into it.’ She was excited until she saw what was inside.
Cable trailed from the core-points in the spine. The skin stretched over the skull like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. No flesh remained between that and the bone beneath. The withered lips drew back over large uneven teeth. The eyes, bloodshot and bugged up past life size, glared from tarry sockets. Something was wrong with the hair. It was hard to make out the rest. The tank proteome — thirty thousand protein species like warm spit — swirled sluggishly about it.
Liv turned away in disgust.
‘It’s not an alien,’ she said. ‘It’s a K-captain.’
For her, that meant a metaphor for the condition of sky-pilots everywhere: dissociation, hallucination, invasive surgery, the surrendering of humanity for a way of life so worthless it made you laugh.
‘Throw it back,’ she advised.
Antoyne didn’t want to get into that. He heard it all before. To change the subject he said, ‘I almost think I recognise this guy.’
Liv took another look: shrugged.
‘They’re all the same. Scoliosis. Pseudo-polio. Half the organs gone, wires everywhere.’ And when Antoyne wondered what unimaginable forces had blown this one out of his ship: ‘Don’t assume it’s male. More than half of them sign up as girls. It’s the thinking twelve-year-old’s alternative to anorexia.’
