confidence. The doorways had no doors. The windows, though intact, were uncurtained. It was always raining. Damp had got into the furniture — mainly cheap veneered cabinets and shelves from which the varnish had been bleached by sunlight and use — and the walls were covered with fibrous, scaly-looking, ring-shaped blemishes. Looking up at the wall beside a doorway, Helen saw that a slightly more than life-sized vulva had emerged from it like a crop of fungus. It wasn’t quite the right colours. The labia had yellow and brown tones, and the startling rigidity of a wooden model. A body was attached, but less of that had emerged from the wall. It was still emerging, in fact, in very slow motion. She felt that it might take years to come through. And while the vulva clearly belonged to an adult, the body was much younger. It still had the fat little belly and undeveloped ribcage of a child. The vulva presented in the same vertical plane as the wall, but the body and the face were somehow foreshortened and leaning back from it at a wrong angle for the anatomy to work. At all points it was seamless with the wall. She couldn’t see much of the face, but it was smiling. In the dream, Helen began to make a shrieking sound, full of the most appalling sense of grief and horror. She could hear herself but she couldn’t stop.
It was so clearly all of a piece, she thought: the loss or substitution of her possessions, the decayed building open to the elements but still usable, the body emerging seamlessly from the wall in very slow motion. On waking she had experienced spatial confusion; remained dissociated well into the morning. Even now, staring out across the titanium-coloured water of Studland Bay, where a small white boat was chewing its way towards the grey horizon, she felt as if she hadn’t quite re-entered herself. She felt as if, down inside, vital parts of her had separated. She felt that something had broken in her personality — had broken, perhaps, some long time before — but that she would never be able to understand what.
Later, in the hotel restaurant, she listened to a mid-level pharma executive telling his friends about a recent trip to Peru. Really, she thought, he was less entertaining them than issuing a set of instructions. He had chosen a KLM flight, he was careful to emphasise, because it allowed him to do some diving en route: they might want to go more directly. When they arrived, there were certain things they should on no account pay for. As for the ruins, well, the visibility had been bad, but ‘as their apology to us’ for not being able to provide the expected view, the natives had cooked him and his girlfriend a special meal. ‘They didn’t charge us for that, obviously.’ Dr Alpert stared at him in open dislike until he noticed her, then forced him to look away. His name, as far as she could tell, was Dominic. At forty, Dominic still sounded like an MBA undergraduate pretending to be his own father. He seemed like a throwback to another age; so did his friends, with their Boden casual wear and pleasant, affirmative manners. So, she thought, did she. She always kept a pair of boots in the Citroen: she would spend a day or two walking the Downs — to Corfe certainly, perhaps even as far the Purbeck Hills and Lulworth Cove. She would walk until she felt better. First she would separate Dominic the pharma from his friends, take him upstairs, and fuck him carefully to a tearful overnight understanding of the life they all led now.
Acknowledgements
Tim Etchells contributed to the list of the assistant’s names at the end of Chapter 21. Paragraphs of Chapter 3 appeared in
Also by M. John Harrison:
The Committed Men
The Centauri Device
The Ice Monkey
Viriconium
Climbers
The Luck in the Head (with Ian Miller)
The Course of the Heart
Signs of Life
Travel Arrangements
Light
Nova Swing
