World Was All Before Them

Th e Wo r l d Wa s A l l B e f o r e Th e m

M at t h e w R e y n o l d s

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TWENTY-FIVE HOURS IN OCTOBER

Brakelights flared and 0.47 of a second later young Dr Philip Newell too pressed the brake pedal of his VW Golf 1.6 Tdi Bluemotion, built 26 months and 13 days before, in Wolfsburg, on the river Aller, the arrow-straight Aller, where perch dart and poplars flutter, though Philip had bought it only the other week. The precision-engineered silver machine slowed slightly from 80mph to 74 and then, as Philip saw more red lights reddening ahead of him in a long, quadruple array curving right to follow the road uphill, slowed again when he pressed the pedal further down, feeling the metal of it push back against his foot, against the skin and muscle and metatarsals and proximal phalanges: 60, 42, 35, 30, then a judder down to 20 – at which Sue, sitting next to him, pulled her eyes back from the misty distant late afternoon sky, and looked forward, and glanced across towards him, and looked forward again at these things that were stacking together ahead of them, agglomerations of metal and rubber and plastic, slowing and settling, nosing each 1

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other’s rear ends – they were bullocks, snorting mist, glaring with red eyes: yes, a herd being pushed backwards, pawing at the ground with heavy black hooves as, in a slow glide, the engine disengaged now, Philip and Sue, in their own metal and plastic box (with fabric trim), slackened to 10, 5, 0, perked up to 10 again for a moment, then dropped to a more definitive halt. There was silence. Then: ‘Phhhhu, ’ said Philip. ‘Mmgn, ’ said Sue. All around, there was the air, chilling and thickening as it was rotated out of reach of the sun. There was the land which, leftwards, fell away and mapped itself out into fields, hedgerows, copses, lanes and roads, lines of telegraph poles and sequences of pylons, a farmhouse with corrugated iron barns held close around it, a slab of cottages, and, in the soft fawn blur of the horizon, a scattering of sparkles as the daylight drained. On the right, beyond the other carriageway, where other cars speed irritatingly along the channel of the road, each one swelling as it approaches, its headlights dazzling, until, snap, in a moment, it has passed, and is receding and is gone; beyond this intensely frustrating, flowing carriageway rises an embankment strengthened with honeycomb-pattern slabs of concrete through which plants grow, thistle and dandelion, rye grass and meadow grass, wall barley, common couch and cock’s foot, buttercups and poppies, though they are not flowering any longer, they have gone to seed: only the occasional red clover raises its fingers to the sky. On the crest of the embankment, a fence of metal posts and barbed wire holds back a mass of nettles, their leaves blackened and shrivelling in the cold. Behind them are the 2

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cathedral shadows of a wood where beeches loom, where fallen leaves of dun-colour and taupe and sulphur and skin-pink are changing, becoming slimy, fragrant, soft, returning to the ground where worms contract and surge, sucking their way through the earth, where ants and mites and beetles thrive, where cylindrocarpon and penicillium extend their filaments, where azotobacter and acromobacter flourish; and where, under a tipped-up, rotting trunk of maple, woodlice scurry and earwigs writhe. An early fox pads by, ears up, head a-twitch. A late mosquito drifts staggeringly towards its burrow. A pipistrelle flits. High up a sparrow fluffs its feathers for the night, rolls its head this way and that and lodges its hard, tender beak within the warmth. Further off, at the end of a slender branch, dangles a single stubborn apple, already gleaming in a glint of moonlight, even though it has been hollowed and part-ingested by a maggot housed within. Yet none of this is seen by Philip and Sue, for they are sealed within their own particular micro-environment where: bang! the ball of Philip’s right thumb hits the steering wheel which judders while the reactive energy of the impact makes his hand bounce back towards him. Because he really wanted to get home. He needs to rest. Because although the first two weeks had gone OK it was still really demanding. Because the reason they had gone OK was that he’d been fully awake, and alert, and wholly focused. Adrenalin prickling in him non-stop through the day. Now that he was at last a proper doctor. Now that it was finally at last just him being put face to face with a patient and being allowed to, no, obliged to do the utterly weird things that doctors do. Like for instance stick your fingers up their arse. Or listen to the clank-thud of their heart. Or 3

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inject alien liquid into their blood vessels – if that was the right path to take, of course, only if it was right. Because there’s the rub. You can misdiagnose by missing something. Or you can misdiagnose by seeing something that isn’t there. Or also you can simply have a brain-out and put the wrong word in the prescription, depomedrone not depoprovera (!) Or you can miss a contra-indication. Or you can . . . or actually you can just not feel up to slowly and carefully unpicking and thoroughly considering those many cases which are a tangle of body and mind. In which doctoring is as much about talking as handing out medicine. Or more. He sees a mother and a little boy sitting side by side in two orange plastic bucket chairs in the consulting room. He sees himself, listening, nodding, answering: he is projecting receptiveness and wisdom and concern. The little boy is bored, his eyes are sleepy, he is rocking back and forth on his hands which are squeezed beneath his thighs. The mother is speaking, she is fluting anxiety and self-blame. She drags a hand across her eyes, over the pink, hawk nose and the high forehead. She pushes her hand up into the clump of blonde hair, grabbing it, pulling it back. The eyes that look up at him are blurred and narrow, pouched in sagging blueish skin. She wants the treatment to be reconsidered. She doesn’t want to criticise Dr Adam Hibbert, of course not; but she thinks that now she is in a calmer place. And now she, Janet Stone is in a calmer place, she has more time to give to Albert. And now she has more time to give to Albert she can do a better job. Because – suddenly her scratchy voice breaks through and Philip hears it in his head as he shifts his foot from brake to accelerator and nudges the car forward, letting it roll a little before resignedly rotating his foot back to touch the 4

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brake once more: ‘What I can’t get over is I can’t stop thinking that because I wasn’t there for him, because I was so crap, he is being stuffed full of chemicals. And doctor’ – she says, staring at Philip pleadingly – ‘they’ve turned him, those pills have, into a different person.’ She sniffs. She hangs her head. Now she is looking at the chessboard of brown and mushroom-coloured carpet tiles. She says, resolutely, woefully, one word at a time: ‘He’s getting medicine instead of a mum.’ Which was great. It was really great that she had come to that perception and was showing that resolve. But that didn’t mean it was necessarily true. And whether it was or wasn’t it was going to take a lot of time, a lot of careful management. Which meant he really needed to get home and rest. Because OK, Janet and Albert Stone would probably not be back in the orange bucket chairs already next week. But someone would be. Someone equally problematic starting at 9 tomorrow. And all he asked was a moment of calm by himself at the end of the weekend, just to sit, and turn the pages of the paper, and check something or other on his phone; just to relax, and breathe, so as later to have some chance of going to sleep. Which was something that presumably never troubled Dr Adam Hibbert. Dr Adam Hibbert who felt no anxiety, slept the sleep of the innocent and the worthy every night. No, actually, the fact is Dr Adam Hibbert doesn’t need to sleep at all; he is always on the go. Far away, on his completely exciting and worthy sabbatical somewhere up the Khyber, Dr Adam Hibbert is even now conducting amputations as the bullets whizz around him. Philip breathes in decidedly through his nose. He lays his hand upon Sue’s hand which, he now notices, is resting elf-like upon 5

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the jean fabric over his thigh. He realises that Sue’s elfin hand is sending little sonar-blips of tranquillity across his hip towards his spine and up it to his mind. She in her turn feels, ever so slightly, his touch; but she doesn’t really notice it because she too is thinking, she is thinking of the gallery, of the big last room where Al Ahmed’s sun will be, that amazing, sumptuous, profligate idea of a haze of threads created from the shredded fabric of a whole wardrobe of Fortuny gowns. For the big last room of the gallery would be darkened, gloomy like the sky around her here. So the shattered fabric would emerge glimmeringly from the atmosphere, not trashily shine out. So it would seem diss-, no, what was the word: immanent. Although actually, here, now, you can’t really properly see the blackening air since their car is illuminated by the headlights of the car behind. And that one must be illuminated by the headlights of the car behind it, etc; and it will be the same for the cars in front, so that they are all enclosed in a sort of tube of myopic brightness. But never mind because still, peering through that circumambient gleam, you can just about imagine Al Ahmed’s sun floating there high up and distant and sublime. Which was, she supposed, with a sudden slide of disappointment, how it was going to figure in the gallery, winched up out of reach. Whereas what she would like, what she personally would like, would be if you were allowed to touch it. If you could miraculously, outrageously reach out and grab and hold some of the precious filaments in your fist. Or if you could push your face into them so that, not only so they stroked your cheeks but so you caught the smell of them whatever that would be. Or if – get this – how about if also you were allowed to stick out your tongue 6

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and touch with that, or taste with that. Because how many people have actually touched a piece of fabric with their tongue? She was standing on a box, she was at – where was that place in London where the loonys stood? – well anyway she was standing there with a megaphone holding forth. Try it! Taste a shirt today! And what was kind of sad but also kind of brilliant was that if people did, if anyone actually did that tiny thing, or if you could put on a show where people were allowed to, encouraged to, and then to think about it – then they would be surprised. It would make a difference to them. Because there is so much to notice that we usually do not. So much to nourish us! Even now, even here in this stretch of what was officially a waste of time, what was officially deeply, horribly frustrating. What was there, well, for instance, there was Philip sitting there beside her. She lifted her hand away from his knee and moved it across, and down, and folded it into her other hand which was lying on her lap. She let herself sense his presence on the far side of the air between them, his condensed energy, his twitchiness – the way his head would settle rigid . . . and then jerk, the change of mind, the shift of gear, the altering angle of his arm. His fingers fluttered against the steering wheel. He pushed himself back into the seat. He scrunched his shoulders and let them fall. Always the same, even in bed at night, the tossing and turning. Whereas, with her, all that moved in her were her lungs, breathing, and the air through her nostrils and her pipeways. No: that couldn’t be completely right. There was the heart, and the blood. There were doubtless all sorts of chemical reactions too. Actually . . . actually maybe this could be the thing! This could be something to offer up 7

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to Omar next week. If you could catch it in a piece . . . this unceasing activity that went on in people even when they were still. Marc Quinn’s head of blood. No – the thing to do would be . . . how could you . . . what was wanted was some way of capturing, no, registering the fleetingness, the inside movement, the movement that was always going on inside. Such as for instance maybe an ECG. ‘Do people’s heads’ – she asked – ‘use different amounts of energy, depending on who you are? If you record people’s brainwaves can you get an electronic signature?’ Philip smiled a familiar smile. Such a Sue question. ‘Don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘Maybe someday but I don’t think we can at the moment. It varies. When you think more, that’s activity, you can pick that up – there are jagged peaks. It’s more intense when you’re concentrating, trying to solve a problem. When you relax the waves stretch out.’ ‘Did Einstein’s brain,’ – she continued her enquiry – ‘use more energy than everyone else’s?’ ‘I think only if he used it more.’ Philip moved his feet, set the car going forward a little, let it freewheel. ‘But with him he probably didn’t. Things just occurred to him. Popped up.’ ‘If you could measure a great physicist’s brain, do an ECG just when he was about to have a really great idea . . .’ ‘It really wouldn’t show any different. I doubt it would. It couldn’t. It’d be like any old idea, like thinking, um, like thinking what to get someone for their birthday.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Or what to have for breakfast.’ He made the car slow, stop. 8

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‘Basically your brain uses the same as a lightbulb. It doesn’t vary much. If you spend all day thinking really hard it’s not going to make you thin.’ ‘So that’s true, lightbulbs in comic books. Sort of.’ The car nudged forward a little bit then settled to a halt yet again. ‘You know actually it’s E-E-G,’ Philip couldn’t stop himself adding: ‘Not ECG. ECG is the heart, cardio. EEG is Electroencephalo-gram.’ Sue let her mind be filled with the sounds that the stereo was sending out to bounce around them, a beat and some kind of electronic interference making a sort of tune, swelling and spiralling and soaring and falling. What instruments were they? You couldn’t tell, no instruments, electricity. You could hook a machine up to a brain, amplify it. Which would give you the music of thinking. Which must be a bit like whalesong. Pathways of flashing lights as the ideas travel down them; and the sound to go with it. Fill the whole gallery so people are inside the pathways and the sound, inside the experience of experience. Or get these cars to hoot one after another: that would be like a message passing along. Or flash their lights. Morse. The train was like that too. Every morning travelling in and every evening coming back she was like an idea. The rattle of its arrival; the shrieking of brakes. You could have a track running round the gallery, interlocking, an enormous endless spaghetti junction of trains. Not in a landscape but in some body-like environment, curvy and enveloping. And the trains tiny, much smaller than usual, specially manufactured, nipping here and there like mice, unstoppable. That would 9

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surprise the punters, wake them up. That would be a change from Al Ahmed. It was definitely worth developing. Take a bit of time on Mon and Tue. Frame the concept properly. Because Omar had said he wanted something fresh. Because she had definitely got the impression that now, now that she had settled in, learned the ropes, he wanted to see what she could offer. And here it was. Come Wednesday, she would pitch it. Yay! She smiled. She became aware of herself once more, that she had a body, that she was sitting in the car. They seemed now to be moving more persistently. She raised her head and looked out, around. Still high darkness to the right: trees. Still to the left a sweep of land, fields, a scattering of lights in the distance. Still couldn’t really see. ‘It’s a crash,’ Philip announced. ‘Is it?’ ‘On the other side. This was all just people slowing down to look. All this just because of people slowing down to look. It’s bananas.’ ‘It must have been bad.’ She gazes across his hands on the steering wheel and sees on the other side a fire engine and two police cars each lit up by the others’ lights. They are framed by the slender arch of a footbridge. From the warmth with Philip inside his car Sue looks out into the cold and sees, beyond the central reservation, someone standing, in a luminous jacket, signalling cars past in the other direction, one by one. There is an ambulance with its back doors open. Now Philip is accelerating: Sue’s head swivels correspondingly, peering to see, in the darkness, with cars easing past in front of it on the other 10

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carriageway, a wheeled stretcher being pushed along, its steel frame glinting, and beyond it, lodged under the far corner of the footbridge, a big stopped lump, a conglomeration of shadows, something compacted, its tyres in the air. So they sped past, on the other side, not having witnessed the crash, the panicked shrill screech as the car slid on its roof over the coarse asphalt, still going at 50, heading towards the . . . no – before that, the bang of its hitting the springy steel barrier on the central reservation which sent it bouncing in a cartwheel, once, twice, as, inside, for the solitary driver, only 19 years old, the world had gone slow and quiet, giving him leisure almost to enjoy the unusual visual experience, the horizon rotating, trees turning like the hands of a clock, until bang! – he was upside-down and the roof had crunched into the top of his head and he was sliding sideways at insane speed with this terrible noise all around him until . . . no, before that, the first hint of a wobble as he, Toby Knight, heading back to uni after a cool weekend away, moved out into the fast lane, not really going that fast, only 85, or so it seemed until the steering wheel jerked to the left and he pulled it back but now he is veering too far the other way so he straightens and the car drags left again so he pulls again and it is too, too fast, it is zigzagging, it is like slithering on ice and, bang! – he hits the springy steel barrier on the central reservation which sends him cartwheeling until . . . no, even before that, six weeks before, the intrusion of a two-inch, flat-headed nail which had somehow sneaked in between the treads and been pushed in through the vulcanised rubber, through the layers of textiles and steel ply, penetrating the whole carcass. There it had lodged, solid and 11

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secret, until the particular combination of pressures, heading downhill, at 85, on a slight curve, stressed the vicious sleeper-cell, and angled it, and tweaked it, until, pfuff, there was a sudden rush of air and the tyre sags and bells and wobbles and the steel rim of the wheel jars into the road surface and the tire rips and there is no grip now and the car is heaving to and fro as the driver struggles until, bang! – he has hit the springy barrier on the central reservation and is cartwheeling and sliding and collides side-on with the edge of the concrete pier of the pedestrian bridge at which Toby’s upside-down head is jerked sideways and hits the door pillar next to it and bounces back and his neck muscles tear and his vertebrae are dislodged and the delicate brain tissue crashes against the hard internal wall of the skull, so that membranes are compressed and blood vessels perforated and the grey matter begins to bruise and throughout the whole beautiful, intricate brain the shock-waves spread a microscopic anti-net of broken connections, a spray of less-than-hairline cracks. There he is, his head against the roof again, his consciousness glad that it has all come to an end, that it is quiet, this black and white world he is in now, even if there is a sensation of wrongness coming from his neck, even if he seems to be having to try very hard to keep seeing, seems to be having to make an effort to continue even being. There are sounds in the distance, what are they? People calling, footsteps running? Or the song of morning birds? Passing by, 37 minutes later, Sue says to Philip: ‘He must’ve had to be cut out.’ ‘One or two people touch their brakes, then everyone has to, then, bang, there is a traffic jam.’ 12

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‘It’s hard not to look. We were just looking. Well I was.’ ‘There are three thousand five hundred deaths from crashes each year. Ten each day. Nobody cares. We all keep driving. Too fast. I keep driving too fast, that’s the weird thing. I’m completely aware it costs the NHS billions a year, think what we could do with that, think about the sport and good nutrition for young children we could fund with that. We’ve all decided it doesn’t matter. Society has decreed’ – Philip pressed on – ‘that a nought-point-something chance of getting killed by a car each year, that that’s OK. We’ve made that judgment. And yet still each time anyone sees one it’s like oh no what a tragedy.’ But even as he protested, Philip’s thoughts were circling his image of the scene of the accident like swallows swooping and sighing, and then following his image of the ambulance as, its doors clammed shut, it eased into motion and trundled away, lights flashing carnivalesquely but making no noise. Inside, what would there be? Neck brace, blood pressure cuff, ECG, oxygen mask and fingertip oximeter and IV. The paramedic having raised a vein and gingerly slid in the needle and attached the tube. The paramedic now sitting beside the patient steadying his head and watching, watching for any signs of flagging life. Speedily but carefully the vehicle would drive along and up and round and here and there until they reached the DI, the high, square, tiled carriageway porch of A and E, the bright harsh light, the inevitable jolt and rattle as the stretcher trolley hits the ground and trundles up the slope and onto the pavement and over the ribbed mat at the entrance and then it is into the glide of the smooth polished concrete floors inside and is drawn along by the imperious rhythm of the hospital 13

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where, once it has found its bay, a staff-grade will sweep in to assess, with a nurse to assist. Pulse, pupillary reflex; focus on the head and neck, fingertips caressing, assess GCS, off for an X-ray,another ECG hooked up, consultant brought in to consult. Surgery? High risk of secondary injury. Control bleeding. What is the ICP? Craniotomy? But now the tense, bright, messy, high-tec scene is fading from Philip’s attention which is returning to the slow-motion rhythm of the road, the pulling out and tucking in, the passing and being overtaken. To the left the moon makes zigzag lines of quartz among the granite of the clouds. Through Sue’s mind, the lights of the road traverse, stretching her thoughts this way and that, pulling them apart from the moment of the disagreement. Ahead are pair after pair of red lights, all almost the same, dull as though resentful, except for the occasional different setup, a configuration of sparky LEDs, lozenges of glitter around empty eyes. Beside them are the diamond headlamps of the other carriageway streaming forward into their future but back into her past, following this journey she is taking with Philip in reverse, perhaps for a mile or two before branching off, perhaps for longer, perhaps even, one of them, all the way back, A34, M what was it, M something else, A this or that, another A, a B and then other roads, and others, not to mention the roundabouts and traffic lights and roadsigns and verges; not to mention the towns and villages and isolated houses; not to mention the fields and woods and copses and hedgerows, the barbed wire fences and electric pylons and telegraph wires, the contour lines and public footpaths and sites of special scientific interest. All that stuff would be the same for them, for whoever it was, in that car, taking the same road (only 14

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backwards); the same environment passed through. But some things would be different: the pedestrians, the other cars on the road. The weather would have shifted a little, and the light. Wind dropped, probably, as the evening enveloped what for her and Phil had been the afternoon. To be blunt about it, she thought, as she surveyed the ideas that had come into being in her mind, time would have passed, that’s all. No, because actually time had passed. Not ‘would have passed’: it had. Her mind felt stuck as she tried to merge the landscape she could remember into the landscape she was imagining, and to spread that imagining out onto the world behind. So time had passed, so what? Well, a person might have cut their finger. Or died. Or split up with someone. Whereas, on the other hand, that blade of grass was still that blade of grasss, unless it had been trodden on. That stone was still that stone. Though actually with many of the people too it would be much the same. With many of them nothing really would have changed at all. The car that she was following, in her mind, back the way that she had come, turned. It turned into streets whose names she maybe could remember. Black Rock Rise, then something else, then Ocean View. It turned, this small white hatchback, in at an open gateway on the right between jagged stone walls. But her mind travelled on, on to the next driveway which sloped down between amoeba-shaped patches of luminous green lawn and divided around a pond. She followed the rightward branch towards a burgundy front door and then – whoosh – she was in through the letter box and floating on in through the hallway corridor to the sitting room with its thick cream carpet and fuchsia 15

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suite, its several mahogany occasional tables with their glass surface-protectors upon which Betty’s collection of Russian dolls shone plumply; its frilly lamps, both table and standard, and its flesh-coloured walls crammed with gold-framed photographs of seabirds soaring and diving and perching and pecking and nestling and roosting, chubby, with their trademark look of shock. There was the picture window, beneath which the hillside sloped gently away until a sketchy fence marked the boundary of the garden; after which there was an area of tundra where the coast path passed; after which there was nothing except the cliff-edge and some air. From the cosy eyrie of old Mr and Mrs Newell you saw, if you did not look down, no land at all: an endlessness of gas and liquid; the sea, slate-dark, choppy, crisped with white, as Sue imagined it now, seeing herself sunk in the soft pink armchair nearest the window, looking out; and the sky a million swirling wisps and mists and accumulations of paleness and grey. With her legs folded up, she had been watching a thicker, blacker raggedy slab of cloud move towards her, darkening the air and sea beneath; but here was Betty, come through from the kitchen, picking up the two cups she must have left a moment earlier in the serving hatch, easing herself carefully forward, the cups held stiffly out ahead of her, one in each hand. She bent her knees to place the cups on the low table in front of the window and set about sitting down in a chair identical to Sue’s on the other side of it. She gripped the armrests; she leaned her whole body backwards; she bent at the hips and the knees, keeping her weight always on the hydraulic pillars of her arms, until she had lowered herself gently into the cushion. 16

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‘Bloody back,’ she said. ‘It’s such a nuisance. But the best thing,’ she said, struggling to lean forward, ‘is to keep mobile.’ Sue pushed Betty’s cup across the table. ‘Thank you dear. What I hate,’ she said frankly, lifting the cup, then pausing it beneath her lower lip, ‘is to think this is a taste of things to come.’ Sue must have looked at her enquiringly. ‘Old age.’ She sighed the words. ‘Anyone can slip a disc,’ offered Sue. ‘Yes,’ said Betty, gratified. ‘Yes they can.’ And then: ‘Well, I’ve brought you a cup of tea.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘No sugars, that’s right, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, that’s right.’ There was a pause. And then: ‘This is so amazing,’ said Sue. ‘Better than the pictures, I always say.’ ‘You must spend, do you spend whole afternoons just sitting here? I could.’ ‘Oh no, not whole afternoons! But it is’ – she carried on after a moment, making a concession – ‘nice to know it’s there. You know, you can just glance out and see it, see the weather coming in.’ ‘Do you ever feel . . .’ Sue had said then, turning, reaching for her cup of tea, looking up, ‘that you’re sort of dissolving into it? Your spirit going out into it, and it comes into you, so that you sort of rise up out of yourself. Fade away?’ There had been a pause. 17

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‘That’s how I felt, a bit like that, just then,’ Sue had said, stubbornly. ‘Ken appreciates it for his photography. He lurks here, like a hunter. Twitchy’ – her voice was warm at the thought of him, of his energy. ‘That’s what they call them, you know, birdwatchers: twitchers. And he is, when he’s lying here in wait. The perfect hide, he says it is. That’s one he got from here’ – she says, turning carefully in the chair, angling her head, then her shoulders, then lifting up her arm to point – ‘a black-headed gull, though you can see it’s more of a brown head really. Mostly all the ones in flight he got from here. Not the ones on the cliffs, obviously, or the shoreline, because you can’t see them out of this window, can you? It’d be a miracle.’ She chuckled briskly, glancing into Sue’s eyes for an answering smile. ‘He goes down into town to get them developed. There’s a place there that does them properly, Dawton’s.’ ‘He hasn’t gone digital?’ ‘Doesn’t hold with it.’ Betty gulped the end of her tea and eased herself forward to plonk the cup on the edge of the table. Then she leaned back upright, stiff and straight, and looked at Sue out of her deeply lined grey face with her shining blue eyes. ‘I didn’t want to move up here yet. It was Ken’s idea. I liked it down in the town where Philip grew up . . . But, you know Ken a little bit now, don’t you? So you know he does always want to get things organised well in advance. This bungalow came on the market and he said: it’s ideal, we’ll be all set up. But for me it was a wrench. Because down there, in town, in those streets, that’s where our whole lives had been. I mean our whole lives as a 18

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family: I lived in Haston before that. But down in town’ – she smiled puckishly – ‘that’s where Philip learned to walk! We’d go out, toddle along. Do a bit of shopping. And then we’d be at the sea. He was fascinated by the pebbles. One of them would catch his eye. He’d be standing there, you know wobbling a bit, with his little arms stretched out as if he wanted to give the whole world a great big hug. Then he’d set off and I could see he’d be making for a particular pebble. One of those great round ones, you know how big they are. He would bend over, and lift, and lift, or try to lift, and then . . . whoops, over he tipped, and his face’d go into the beach and his nappy would be in the air. It was’ – there was that warm tone again in her voice, but she did not laugh – ‘so funny.’ After a moment she went on: ‘So to tell the truth I don’t feel quite ready yet to just sit here and doze and fade away.’ She looked stern. ‘Give me a few years yet.’ ‘A few decades,’ Sue had said emphatically, wincing as she realised the meaning Betty had taken from her words. But now, as she winces again at the recollection, it leaves her, and she sees that she and Philip in their VW Golf Bluemotion are nearing the end of their journey, nosing along Dartham Street where the shops are, then Turnpike Lane, then over the little bridge which marks the edge of the old town, then right, beside some ancient, patient willows. They passed along Helium Avenue with its meandering edges and its ornamental planting, of privet, beech, rhododendron and even the occasional palm, designed to screen the dedicated parking places that fronted each pastiche Victorian property. Then they were into the heart of The Willows, a signature brownfield 19

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development where every home boasted magnolia-painted walls, recessed down-lighting, half-height tiling to the ensuite, and a multi-point security system to the front door, together with all the high-spec energy-saving measures that today’s environmentallyconscious home-owners feel entitled to demand. In vehicular motion, Sue and Philip negotiated Elysium Crescent (Georgian) and traversed Parnassus Row (Tudorbethan) before turning into their own patch, Eden Grove, a terrace articulated around three sides of a rectangle to give the impression of converted stables in a country house, or perhaps an array of traditional paupers’ cottages. On the roof at the centre of this array was a little angular belfry from which no sound ever came. Philip parked in their allotted space in the central courtyard. Having unfolded themselves out of the vehicle, lifted the tailgate, shut it, and swung their bags over their shoulders, the pair of them were guided by low-level lighting towards the frontage of no. 12, the two-up-two-down individually designed quality residence which was their place (rented) for the circle of the year. The slammed car doors had left a silence in the air; above them, the cold stars shone. Indoors there was the usual hanging of coats in the hallway alcove and kicking-off of shoes. There was the clomping upstairs (this was Sue) so as to chuck knickers and T-shirts into the round wicker Habitat laundry basket in the corner of the bedroom, and to hang up her grey Diesel cargo pants and black Reiss zip-up top, and to lay Philip’s jersey and jeans on the slim blue ottoman at the end of the bed for him to damn well deal with; and there was the going-through to the open-plan sitting-room-kitchendiner (this was Phil) and pulling open the clattery door of the 20

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fridge to extract a little bottle of Becks, and levering it open, and slumping with it on the shiny brown soft faux-leather sofa in front of the sharp-edged gleaming square pine occasional table, thumbing at his Desire to check the week ahead and monitor his Pocket Empire and scroll through the last few days of Pulse updates, statins safe to give to patients with abnormal LTFs, BMA to resist rationing role, even though in some cases, Philip thought, a bit of rationing probably wouldn’t go amiss. He could hear the tumble and splatter of water upstairs as Sue showered, and so kept pressing here and there on his touchscreen: plunging pass rates for CSA / echinacea ‘no use for colds’ – but hang on, when you looked into the figures there was a measurable advantage, so predictable the spin in the reporting / 27–floor home for Mumbai billionaire incorporating its own hanging gardens and multistorey car park / Nobel Prize for Chinese dissident Liu Xiabao but he himself does not know it yet though his wife may be able to tell him tomorrow in prison, the grubby tiled walls, pale blue cotton pyjamas, slop bucket, one hour of exercise, if that, metal cot, the slamming of the door / oh look Cher from yesterday already on YouTube and he watched again the marionette movements in rubik cube trousers and heard again smug Cowell saying: ‘I see the future here’ / defuse Taliban child – dumb bombs – flesh-ripping ball-bearings – a carnival of gore – as young as 11 – significant psychological damage – cured with volleyball and cricket – shrapnel – tearing epidermis dermis hypodermis releasing an inflammatory response which floods the damaged site with neutrophils which clear it of debris via phagocytosis except not the lump of metal itself obviously remove with tweezers disinfect 21

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debridement risk of tetanus: administer metronidazole followed by anti-tetanospasmin though what are the chances of sourcing that in the borderlands of Pakistan? Dr Adam Hibbert would know. Philip became aware once more of the room around him. The rumble of the fridge; the whirr of the Virgin box as it updated itself; the cough and sigh of the boiler; the whine of the extractor fan upstairs. Beyond all that, was there also the whispering of ash and elder in a breeze outside? He rose and plugged the phone into its wire on top of the microwave and moved to the room’s door where he turned and lingered, looking around before putting out the light. In the capsule hallway was the saffron gleam of streetlamps filtered through the milky panes of the front door. He doublelocked that door and climbed the carpeted stairs, jogging lightly up them with a little skip halfway. Round the tight end of the landing; in through the bedroom door; and there she was; there was Sue, in the bed he too was going to sidle into. There was her pale face in profile on the pillow. There were her eyelashes. There were her delicate porcelain cheeks – no, soft . . . they were linen / no – silk / no – milk, no – . There she was with her body snug under the duvet and her face in the cosiness of the pillow, aware of him (was she aware of him?) but not looking up: that was trust; that was intimacy; the having her just lie there, knowing he was there; knowing he was there moving around the room, in his clothes, while she lay there warm, with nothing on (probably), with her mind drifting and her body just there gently lying. He lifted his jersey and T-shirt over his shoulders; T-shirt in the basket; jersey added to the pile on the chair. Belt unbuckled; trousers pushed down; socks drawn off in 22

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the same movement, his thumbs hooked under the rims of them. Socks in the basket; trousers on the pile. In his boxers he went back onto the landing and turned into the bathroom: smooth floor, chilly. Never liked the look of his face in close-up, the pores, the incipient stubble, the sebum gleam, the desquamation of the stratum corneum, perpetual attrition of the boundary of the body, softening, flaking, tumbling, floating; a continual disintegration into dust. Tap on; facewash; hot-water; splash; dab dry with a towel, don’t rub. Contacts: bin them. Toothpaste; buzz in the mouth dislodging colonising bacteria streptococcus mutans not in fact ultrasonic; rinses / spit / done. And then he breathes in deeply and out deeply and pads softly through to the bedroom once more where he sits on the side of the bed, lifts himself slightly to ease off his pants, turns, slides, is under the duvet, is wriggling into the warmth where Sue is, touching his chin to the back of her shoulder, his tummy to her bum, his tibia to her heel. She stirs and he stirs; and he shifts and she murmurs; and she reaches out for the light, clicks it off. In the intimate dark, with the front of his thighs against the back of her thighs, and his fingers on the giving flesh of her tummy, and the back of her skull pressing into the cartilage of his neck, his internal pudendal artery dilates and his corpus spongiosum and two corpora cavernosa begin to swell. But her body stays still and her hand moves over his hand, squeezing the tips of his fingers between the tips of hers and the springy lump of her thumb muscle; for her mind is anticipating the morning, the alarm, the getting up, the economical, almost-automatic movements, the leaving the house in the dusk, the three segments of the short walk to the station: the Willows; then the asphalt pathway between chicken-wire fencing 23

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held high by concrete pillars, with bright lights over as the daylight strengthens around; then / but in any case (he thinks) it is late; and he is tired after the being-with-his-parents and the long drive; and as, in his brain, the alpha waves slow and stretch and lose their regularity, so, in his mind, as the bumpy higgledy-piggledy theta waves take over, his thoughts slither and jump and he is with his father halfway up a verdant slope, his father’s wide body in its old waxed jacket, plodding ahead of him, jabbing the ground with a straight old shiny beech-branch stick, each foot in its thick scratchy sock in its old leather boot lifting and landing / while she is completing the third segment, the lane of old houses along the canal, and is into the driven atmosphere of the station at rush hour, the queue at AMT, four people before her; that’s 70, 140, 210, 280 seconds, more than four-and-a-half minutes! – the man in front of her, cheap pinstripe, shiny over the shoulderblades, looks round, catches her eyes, his skin is grey though he can only be thirties, his eye slides off towards the big wall clock in the distance, then he shifts from foot to foot and wriggles his shoulders as all around a tannoy announcement booms distortedly / while his father’s ash-coloured hair whips this way and that across his grooved forehead; the sparse eyelashes flutter and the narrowed eyes water in the wind. What is that on them? Xanthelasma? / while from the platform she steps up into the train, pushes her way determinedly to a seat, and the world starts to pass her by on either side, the station is behind her and the town is behind her and fields spread out on either side and a meandering river flows through them so cold and natural and smooth / 24

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while rib of beef, the cladding of juicy fat, the crisp skin; a nice bit of cheese with two or three glasses of red wine; trifle with custard and, whoosh, up goes the LDL, arteries claggy, look out for angina and/or leg pain during exercise, stifling the blood flow, a yellow lump breaks; and then / so cool and smooth with the summer light dappled through willows, soft squelch of the mud among her toes, the water up to the top of her thighs and she launches herself in / while Philip’s throat tightens as he slithers down the familiar clattering helter-skelter of panic into the blackness, howls echoing, spiders’ webs wrapping him, bats flapping in his face; but he wakes with a jolt and opens his eyes and can see the ceiling through the gloom; can discern the scratch of light outlining the blackout blind over the window. He breathes in, and holds; and out, and lets his muscles droop; and in, and holds; and out . . . here it is safe: he turns and presses his cheek against Sue’s back and lays his forearm over her waist and hip / while she now is into the quiescence of deep sleep, the heart heavy and slow; the breathing heavy and slow; the blood pressure low; her muscles baggy and slack, the body collapsed, each bit of it weighing down into the mattress / while here it is safe, and warm, and they are covered; they are breathing; all the delicate activity of life is going on here, the two of them side by side. He is able to see a little into the darkness. He is touching her and the sheet and the duvet-cover and the pillowcover and the air. The molecules of their atmosphere, of sweat and farts and sperm and mucus and conditioner and body lotion and the remains of kedgeree and Becks and toothpaste on the breath 25

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can all dissolve into his olfactory epithelium and be understood. Here it is safe, and warm, and their skin is intact, for the 13.5 tog microfibre duvet will repel flesh-ripping ball-bearings; and he sees Sue walking towards him, once, in spring, not knowing he would be there: she is stepping speedily forward by the side of a busy road, her glance jumping hither and yon, until, like a grasshopper, it lands on him, on him. She is standing under a cherry tree blossoming in spring; and her face blossoms into a smile. There they lay, the air passing through his mouth and her nose, along their tracheae and bronchi and bronchioles to their alveoli, inflating their pulmonary trees, permeating their respiratory surfaces; and out again, and in. Their hearts pump; their blood circulates; their stomachs continue to digest, their colons to propulse, their skins to perspire. In their brains, electricity ebbs and sparkles and eddies and flows. There they lie, upon a sheet of paymaster cotton nurtured to woolly blobs in the dusty fields of Tennessee, nourished with potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen and lime. There they snuggle, under a duvet of polyester microfibre, manufactured in hilly, thrusting Zhejiang, and shipped from Shanghai past Vietnam, Brunei, Sri Lanka; past Yemen, Eritrea, Libya, Morocco, Lisbon, Vigo, Quimper, to South Shields. There, upon a mattress constructed in Leeds, upon a frame made of Swedish pine, upon a carpet of tufted polypropylene, upon floorboards cut from Estonian pine, they lie; within walls of silica and alumina and lime and iron oxide and magnesia and polylsocyanurate and aluminium foil and gypsum; behind windows of glass sandwiched with argon and held in place with PVC that keep in the warmth and out the chill which settles now 26

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First published in Great Britain 2013 Copyright Š 2013 by Matthew Reynolds The moral right of the author has been asserted Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4088 1796 4 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in **** by ****

www.bloomsbury.com/matthewreynolds

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