Cloud Atlas

tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. God knows, I had bog all else to do at Aurora House except read. The day after my miracle recovery I picked up Half-Lives and, ye gods, began wondering if Hilary V. Hush might not have written a publishable thriller after all. I had a vision of The First Luisa Rey Mystery in stylish black-and-bronze selling at Tesco checkouts; then a Second Mystery, then the Third. Queen Gwen(dolin Bendincks) exchanged a sharp 2B pencil for a blunt blandishment (missionaries are so malleable if you kid them you’re a possible convert), and I set about giving the thing a top-to-bottom edit. One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy-new age. (I, too, have a birthmark, below my left armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet. Georgette nicknamed it Timbo’s Turd.) But, overall, I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential. (The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, “But it’s been done a hundred times before!”—as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!)

My editing work on Half-Lives hit a natural obstacle when Luisa Rey was driven off a bridge and the ruddy manuscript ran out of pages. I tore my hair and beat my breast. Did part two even exist? Was it stuffed in a shoe box in Hilary V.’s Manhattan apartment? Still abed in her creative uterus? For the twentieth time I searched the secret recesses of my briefcase for the covering letter, but I had left it in my Haymarket office suite.

Other literary pickings were lean. Warlock-Williams told me Aurora House had once boasted a little library, now mothballed. (“The Jellyvision’s so much more Real for ordinary people, that’s what it boils down to.”) I needed a miner’s helmet and a ruddy pick to locate this “library.” It was down a dead end blocked off by stacked-up Great War memorial plaques headed “Lest We Forget.” The dust was deep and crisp and even. One shelf of back editions of a magazine called This England, a dozen Zane Grey westerns (in large print), a cookbook entitled No Meat for Me Please! That left All Quiet on the Western Front (in whose page corners a creative schoolboy had long ago drawn frames of a cartoon stick man masturbating with his own nose—where are they now?) and Jaguars of the Skies, a yarn of everyday helicopter pilots by “America’s Foremost Military Suspense Writer” (but, I happen to know, ghostwritten at his “Command Center”—I shall name no names for fear of legal reprisals), and, frankly, bugger all else.

I took the lot. To the starving man, potato peelings are haute cuisine.

Ernie Blacksmith and Veronica Costello, come in, your time is up. Ernie and I had our moments, but were it not for these fellow dissidents, Nurse Noakes would still have me drugged up to my ruddy eyeballs today. One overcast afternoon while the Undead were in rehearsal for the Big Sleep, the staff were in a meeting, and the only sound troubling Aurora House’s slumbers was a WWF contest between Fat One Fauntleroy and the Dispatcher, I noticed, unusually, a careless hand had left the front door ajar. I crept out on a reconnaissance mission, armed with a fib about dizziness and fresh air. Cold singed my lips, and I shivered! My convalescence had stripped me of subcutaneous fat; my frame had shrunk from quasi-Falstaffian to John of Gaunt. It was my first venture outside since the day of my stroke, six or seven weeks before. I circumnavigated the inner grounds and found the ruins of an old building, then fought through unkempt shrubberies to the brick perimeter wall to check for holes or breaches. An SAS sapper could have clambered over with a nylon rope but not a stroke victim with a stick. Drifts of brown- paper leaves were eroded and formed by the wind as I passed. I came to the magnificent iron gates, opened and closed by a flash pneumatic stroke electronic gizmo. Ruddy hell, they even had a surveillance camera and a two- way phone thingy! I imagined Nurse Noakes boasting to the children (I nearly wrote “parents”) of prospective residents that they slept safe and secure thanks to these state-of-the-art surveillance arrangements, meaning, of course, “Pay us on time and you won’t hear a dickey bird.” The view did not bode well. Hull lay to the south, a half- day hike away for a robust stripling down side roads lined with telegraph poles. Only lost holidaymakers would ever stumble across the institute gates. Walking back down the drive, I heard screeching tires and a furious beep from a Jupiter red Range Rover. I stepped aside. The driver was a bullish fellow clad in one of those silvery anoraks beloved of transpolar fund-raisers. The Range Rover screeched to a gravelly stop at the front steps, and the driver swaggered up to Reception like a flying ace from Jaguars of the Skies. Coming back to the main entrance, I passed the boiler room. Ernie Blacksmith poked his head out. “A dram of firewater, Mr. Cavendish?”

I didn’t need to be asked twice. The boiler room smelt of fertilizer but was warmed by the boiler’s coal furnace. Perched on a sack of coal and making contented baby noises was a longtime resident with the status of institution mascot, Mr. Meeks. Ernie Blacksmith was the kind of quiet man you notice at second glance. This observant Scot kept company with a lady named Veronica Costello, who had owned the finest hat shop, legend had it, in Edinburgh’s history. The couple’s demeanor suggested residents at a shabby Chekhovian hotel. Ernie and Veronica respected my wish to be a miserable bugger, and I respected that. He now produced a bottle of Irish malt from a coal scuttle. “You’re half-rocked if you’re thinking of getting out of here without a helicopter.”

No reason to give anything away. “Me?”

My bluff was dashed to pieces on the Rock of Ernie. “Take a pew,” he told me, grim and knowing.

I did so. “Cozy in here.”

“I was a certificated boiler man once upon a time. I service the workings for free, so the management turn a blind eye to one or two little liberties I allow myself.” Ernie poured two generous measures into plastic beakers. “Down the hatch.”

Rain on the Serengeti! Cacti flowered, cheetahs loped! “Where do you get it?”

“The coal merchant is not an unreasonable man. Seriously, you want to be careful. Withers goes out to the gate for the second post at a quarter to four daily. You don’t want him to catch you plotting your getaway.”

“You sound well informed.”

“I was a locksmith too, that was after the army. You come into contact with the semicrim, in the security game. Gamekeepers and poachers and all. Not that I ever did anything illegal myself, mind you, I was straight as an arrow. But I learnt that a good three-quarters of prison bust outs fall flat, because all the gray matter”— he tapped his temple—“gets spent on the escape itself. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. That fancy electric lock on the gate, for example, I could take it apart blindfolded if I had the mind to, but what about a vehicle on the other side? Money? Boltholes? You see, without logistics, where are you? Belly-up is where, and in the back of Withers’s van five minutes later.”

Mr. Meeks screwed up his gnomish features and ground out the only two coherent words he had retained: “I know! I know!”

Before I could discern whether or not Ernie Blacksmith was warning me or sounding me out, Veronica came in through the interior door wearing a hat of ice-melting scarlet. I just stopped myself from bowing. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Costello.”

“Mr. Cavendish, how pleasant. Wandering abroad in this biting cold?”

“Scouting,” Ernie answered, “for his one-man escape committee.”

“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

“Veronica’s parents served life sentences in the intelligentsia,” put in Ernie, with a dash of pride.

She smiled fondly. “Just look at the people who come here during visiting hours! They need treatment for shock. Why else do they spout that ‘You’re only as old as you feel!’ claptrap? Really, who are they hoping to fool? Not us—themselves!”

Ernie concluded, “Us elderly are the modern lepers. That’s the truth of it.”

I objected: “I’m no outcast! I have my own publishing house, and I need to get back to work, and I don’t expect you to believe me, but I am being confined here against my will.”

Ernie and Veronica exchanged a glance in their secret language.