Empty Space

a drink. Deckchairs, sunshades, long-handled pruners. Marnie’s quite expensive ping-pong table. Then, in the shadows, shelves full of half-used garden chemicals. The chemical smells of dusts and powders, spilled across the floor or gone solid in their tins and packets. Then the smell of cardboard boxes, lax with damp, bulging with everything from photograph albums to ornaments. Something was spilling off the shelves, in a shower of fantastic sparks! They were just like the sparks from a firework! They paled slowly but didn’t fade. Anna approached. She let them fall through her upturned hands. She sat on the floor and sifted through them like a child. Light dripped off her fingers, soft-feeling embers like cool sachets of gel, the neon colours of the organs the cat brought in. After a time these colours leached away, just exactly like heat from embers, to leave a drift of small objects she could barely make out in the dark. Anna sorted through them. She turned them over uncomprehendingly. She found a shoebox, green, a trusted brand, and shovelled them into it. Opening the summerhouse door she had thought she heard sounds: laughter, music, the smells of fried food, alcohol and human excitement in a seaside at night. She rubbed the palm of her left hand with the thumb of her right. Presently, she went outside and looked across the river pasture, where her own running footprints made an erratic track through the thick dew.

‘Michael?’ she called softly. ‘Michael?’ She called, ‘Is this you? Are you doing this? Michael this is you, isn’t it?’

She slept heavily and did not dream. The next morning, she drank a cup of weak green tea; ate a dessert spoon of honey stirred into Greek yoghurt; upended the shoebox across the kitchen counter and watched its contents bounce and roll. They were just small things — ordinarily tawdry but in resonant colours — which she thought must once have belonged to Marnie. She stared at them, strewn across the counter like coloured buttons. Some of them were buttons, in different shapes and sizes. Some of them were more like old-fashioned enamel badges — emblems of someone’s miltary career, or a life in nursing or conducting buses, brought up short by pancreatitis or stroke in the early 1970s. There were things that resembled Lego bricks, made of a translucent material too substantial to be plastic; two or three pinchbeck rings with interesting symbols; a cluster of tiny porcelain rosebuds you could pin to a frock; beads, charms, iron-on tattoos, yellowing dice and a pair of moulded plastic lips at the very beginnings of a kiss. Miniature playing cards slipped from a pasteboard box. There was a plastic mug with a mirrored bottom, so that when you drank from it your own face was revealed. A little red Valentine’s heart with diodes inside that even now lit up when Anna pressed the tiny button on the back — although God knew how old it must be. They were the kinds of things that turn up in trays at flea markets. Costume jewellery fallen out of a Christmas cracker thirty years before. Anna was compelled. She phoned Marnie and they had another disagreement.

‘But do try and remember,’ Anna urged. ‘Little 3D pictures! And enamel badges like the ones you wore when you were at Cambridge.’

‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘It is five o’clock in the morning.’

‘Is it, darling?’ Anna said. ‘I thought they were just the type of thing a child might collect,’ she tried to explain. ‘I thought you’d be interested.

‘Do you know something?’ she said. ‘Some of them are warm!’

‘Hang up, Anna,’ Marnie advised. ‘I am.’

Anna stared at the items for some minutes, as if they had given her a new lease of life. Then she fetched her handbag from the hall and out of it, after some rummaging, took out Michael Kearney’s pocket drive. This she put down among all the other stuff, where the light could shine off its slippery titanium surface. While she was staring at it, James the cat came in and began butting and fussing around her calves, his purr thick and close, breathy and mechanical at the same time. Suddenly he went to his bowl and began to eat tuna as if his life depended on it. The milkman left the milk. A train went past on the valley line. The phone rang again. She wondered what had really happened to the summerhouse in the night: everything had remained perfectly silent throughout, she thought, like a fire in a difficult film. She wondered what had happened to her. Eventually, she swept everything back into the shoebox, put the pocket drive in her bag, and caught the next train up to London, where she expected to spend the afternoon nosying into other people’s houses. For once she rather looked forward to it.

FIVE Archive Style

In his glory days Fat Antoyne Messner had run a number of petty mules like the Nova Swing. All featured illegal propulsion systems, capacious holds and occult service histories: they were registered out of planets with made-up names. He had operated them, so he claimed, on behalf of numerous Halo celebrities: Emmie-Lou Parang, Impasse van Sant, Margot Furstenburg, Ed Chianese. Why rocket-sport stars and entradistas like that would need the services of a rusty cargo vessel, when they were up to their eyes in smart carbon and BMG-composite hulls with salvaged alien machinery bolted the other side of the pilot bulkhead, he never made clear. Maybe it was to haul spare parts. Maybe it made them feel good to have a fat man around.

Whether you believed these claims or not, one thing was certain: Antoyne was no longer the loser you used to see beached-up in Saudade City, narratising his bad luck, drinking Black Heart rum, reduced to making small points at the very edge of the game as errand boy for cheap crooks like Vic Serotonin or Pauli DeRaad. He owned his own ship. He had an eye for a transaction. He wasn’t even fat anymore.

At 4am the morning after he met with Toni Reno, Antoyne made some FTL calls, as a result of which he found himself down in the Nova Swing number one hold, re-examining the payload Toni left behind. On the bills of lading it was described, ‘Delivery, insurance, freight, documents on sight’, which is not to say much. Because of his previous career, Antoyne experienced a natural anxiety when it came to Port Authority paper. About the payload itself, technology had told him all it could. He concentrated instead on its viewport, situated at the front end and constructed of three inch quartz glass, opal in colour, elliptical in shape. To obviate reflections, Antoyne had switched off the halogen lights. Every so often he was forced to wipe condensation from the glass with a piece of rag.

If he cupped his hands round his face, he could make out a greenish object, like something alive viewed under low-power photomultiplication. This object moved about, or maybe not. Antoyne didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like being in the dark with it, or the way the Nova Swing main hold seemed warmer than usual, or the carmine LEDs that occasionally flickered into life up and down the mortsafe’s lateral line.

Two years before, Antoyne’s company — Bulk Haulage, aka Dynadrive-DF — had won a six month contract to tow hulks in the Vera Rubin’s World quarantine orbit. Antoyne left the Nova Swing at home, hired an 18/42 series Weber tug — the Pocket Rocket, old but serviceable — and ran the job out of a landing-field bar known to its habitues as ‘The East Ural Nature Reserve’. He took a room for the duration, not far down Gravuley Street from the field, and ate with all the other quarantine dogs at the Faint Dime diner, where he liked the way the light reflected off the chromed faux-Deco panels behind the counter. Early evening would find him at the window of his room, eyeballing the Neapolitan layers of a late sunset while he waited for the neon to come on. It was a two-storey town on a one-issue planet. Their idea of style was yellow Argylls and black loafers. Gravuley Street seemed to go on forever, especially at night.

A week after he arrived, Antoyne watched something strange emerge from a boarded-up building not far from the Faint Dime: the naked body of a baby, magnified to adult size and the same olive-drab colour as the frontage. At first, looking up from the sidewalk to the second floor, he had it as some kind of novelty sign. What would you advertise with a giant baby? He didn’t know. Any kind of baby was a mystery to Antoyne. He didn’t like them much. This one, which appeared perhaps three months old, protruded at an odd angle, so that its pudgy legs lolled apart. It was a girl. Antoyne averted his gaze, as if he had seen some kind of porn not to his taste. He thought he heard a faint, squeezing rustle: when he made himself look again the baby had forced itself out a millimetre or two more. It was working its way into Antoyne’s world. A voice from beside him said without preamble:

‘Have you ever been inside a quarantine hulk?’

This voice belonged to MP Renoko, a man you often met at The East Ural Nature Reserve, where he would begin a conversation by saying: ‘You agree there’s no neccessity to confuse a practical tool with a theory of the world?’ Renoko came and went, but always bought rounds of drinks.

‘I’m relieved to see you,’ Antoyne said. ‘Considering this.’

‘Considering what?’