Cloud Atlas

Get me your ruddy supervisor!”

“I am my supervisor.”

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue.

“Oy!” yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. “There’s a fackin’ queue!”

Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. “I know there’s a ‘fackin’ queue’! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue again just because Nina Simone over there won’t sell me a ruddy ticket!”

A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. “Wassa bovver?”

“This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue,” said the skinhead, “and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

“Look, matey”—the yeti addressed me with condescension reserved for the handicapped or elderly—“we got queues in this country to keep things fair, see, and if you don’t like it you should go back to where you come from, getit?”

“Do I look like a ruddy Egyptian? Do I? I know there’s a queue! How? Because I already queued in this queue, so—”

“This gentleman claims you ain’t.”

“Him? Will he still be a ‘gentleman’ when he daubs ‘Asylum Scrounger’ on your housing-association flat?”

His eyeballs swelled, they really did. “The Transport Police can boot you off the premises, or you can join this queue like a member of a civilized society. Whichever is fine by me. Jumping queues is not fine by me.”

“But if I queue all over again I’ll miss my connections!”

“Tough,” he enunciated, “titty!”

I appealed to the people behind that Sid Rotten look-alike. Maybe they had seen me in the queue, maybe they hadn’t, but nobody met my eye. England has gone to the dogs, oh, the dogs, the ruddy dogs.

Over an hour later London shunted itself southward, taking the Curse of the Brothers Hoggins with it. Commuters, these hapless souls who enter a lottery of death twice daily on Britain’s decrepit railways, packed the dirty train. Airplanes circled in holding patterns over Heathrow, densely as gnats over a summer puddle. Too much matter in this ruddy city.

Still. I felt the exhilaration of a journey begun, and I let my guard drop. A volume I once published, True Recollections of a Northern Territories Magistrate, claims that shark victims experience an anesthetic vision of floating away, all danger gone, into the Pacific blue, at the very moment they are being minced in that funnel of teeth. I, Timothy Cavendish, was that swimmer, watching London roll away, yes, you, you sly, toupeed quizmaster of a city, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blitzed bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen et al.; hot glass office buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother.

Essex raised its ugly head. When I was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this county was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the Midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house, I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes—a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker—varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it along the Say. Sticklebacks in jars. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? Hedgeless, featureless fields. Essex is Winnipeg, now. Stubble was burnt, and the air tasted of crisp bacon sarnies. My thoughts flew off with other fairies, and we were past Saffron Walden when the train juddered to a halt. “Um?.?.?.?,” said the intercom. “John, is this on? John, what button do I press?” Cough. “SouthNet Trains regrets that this service will make an unscheduled stop at the next station due to .?.?. a missing driver. This unscheduled stop will continue for the duration that it takes to locate an appropriate driver. SouthNet Trains assures you we are striving hard”—I clearly discerned a background snigger!—“to restore our normal excellent standard of service.” Rail rage chain-reactioned down the compartments, though in our age crimes are not committed by criminals conveniently at hand but by executive pens far beyond the mob’s reach, back in London’s postmodern HQs of glass and steel. Half the mob owns shares in what it would pound to atoms, anyway.

So there we sat. I wished I had brought something to read. At least I had a seat, and I wouldn’t have given it up for Helen Keller. The evening was lemon blue. Trackside shadows grew monolithic. Commuters sent calls to families on mobile phones. I wondered how that dodgy Australian magistrate knew what flashed through the minds of the shark-eaten. Lucky express trains with nonmissing drivers shot past. I needed the loo, but it didn’t bear imagining. I opened my briefcase for a bag of Werner’s toffees but came up with Half-Lives—The First Luisa Rey Mystery. I leafed through its first few pages. It would be a better book if Hilary V. Hush weren’t so artsily-fartsily Clever. She had written it in neat little chapteroids, doubtless with one eye on the Hollywood screenplay. Static squealed in the speakers. “This is a passenger announcement. SouthNet Trains regrets that as a suitable driver for this train cannot be located we will proceed to Little Chesterford station, where a complimentary coach will transport passengers on to Cambridge. Those able to are recommended to make alternative travel arrangements, as the coach will not reach Little Chesterford station [how that name chimed in my memory!] for .?.?. an unknown duration. Further details can be found on our website.” The train crawled a mile of twilight. Bats and wind-borne rubbish overtook us. Who was driving now if there wasn’t a driver?

Stop, shudder, doors open. The abler-bodied streamed off the train, over the footbridge, leaving me and a couple of taxidermist’s castoffs to limp in their wake at quarter speed. I heaved myself up the steps and paused for breath. There I was. Standing on the footbridge of Little Chesterford station. Ye gods, of all the rural stations for a marooning. The bridle path to Ursula’s old house still skirted the cornfield. Not much else did I recognize. The Sacred Barn of the Longest Snog was now Essex’s Premier Fitness Club. Ursula had met me in her froggy Citroen that night during reading week in our first term, right .?.?. on this triangle of gravel, here. How bohemian, Young Tim had thought, to be met by a woman in a car. I was Tutankhamen in my royal barge, rowed by Nubian slaves to the Temple of Sacrifice. Ursula drove me the few hundred yards to Dockery House, commissioned in Art Nouveau times by a Scandiwegian consul. We had the place to ourselves, while Mater and Pater were in Greece holidaying with Lawrence Durrell, if memory serves. (“Memory Serves.” Duplicitous couplet.)

Four decades later the beams of headlights from executive cars in the station car park lit up a freak plague of daddy longlegs, and one fugitive publishing gentleman in a flapping raincoat striding around a field now lying fallow for EU subsidies. You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap—I mean, it’s not ruddy Luxembourg we live in—but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters. Dockery House was still standing, isolated from its neighbors by a privet fence. How opulent the building had felt after my own parents’ bland box of suburbia—One day, I promised, I’m going to live in a house like this. Another promise I’ve broken; at least that one was only to myself.

I skirted the edge of the property, down an access road to a building site. A sign read: HAZLE CLOSE— HIGHLY PRIZED EXECUTIVE HOMES IN THE HEART OF ENGLAND. Upstairs at Dockery, lights were on. I imagined a childless couple listening to a wireless. The old stained-glass door had been replaced by something more burglarproof. That reading week I’d entered Dockery ready to peel off my shameful virginity, but I’d been so in awe of my Divine Cleopatra, so nervous, so eyeballed up on her father’s whiskey, so floppy with green sap that, well, I’d rather draw a veil over the embarrassment of that night, even at forty years’ remove. Very well, forty-seven years’ remove. That same white-leafed oak had scratted at Ursula’s window as I attempted to perform, long after I could decently pretend I was still warming up. Ursula had a gramophone record of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in her bedroom, that room there, where the electric candle glows in the window.

To this day I cannot hear Rachmaninoff without flinching.

The odds of Ursula still living at Dockery House were zilch, I knew. Last I heard she was running a PR office