August (21 page)

‘What are you doing?'

‘I want to see. I want to get to the mirror. I want to see.'

‘And how will that help?'

‘Then I'll know.'

‘You won't know anything.'

In his panic Tristan couldn't find his reflection. He reached for Grace's neck.

‘Tell me!' he screeched, feeling his fingers gain purchase in the yielding flesh. She didn't resist. Her face set in stony absence, a look he had seen on the monks when they meditated. He let go.

‘I am sorry.'

‘Again.'

‘Yes, again.'

She waited before speaking, asserting the terms.

‘I am no doctor, Tristan, but from what I can see your eye is swollen almost closed.'

‘What can you tell from that part that is open?'

‘It is red.'

‘Bloodshot?'

‘More red than that. There is only red.'

Tristan raised his hand to his face. The movement was slow and clumsy. His fingers were too damaged to tell him much and the rawness of his pulpy face sent him into retreat.

‘You'll be all right,' she said.

‘You say that more often than I say sorry.'

He could make out the window now, a white cobweb of fractures, yet resolute. The world beyond was taking distorted shape: the dark edge of a rock face, tall grass running to seed, and, beyond, the grey-blue of distance as the world dropped away. They had not hit the bottom. What was above them would determine the outcome. If they had settled beneath an overhang there was no way of their being seen from the road. Fate, determined yet unknowable.

‘You should have called out,' Grace said. ‘When you stood at my window, you should have called out.'

‘What difference would it have made?' he said.

‘We can never know.'

‘No.'

‘What happened to you that night?' she asked. ‘How did you find me again?'

‘What does it matter? They will find us or they won't. That is our story now.'

‘I am interested.'

‘You will wish you hadn't been.'

‘Life is full of risks,' Grace replied.

‘It is no risk. It is certain.'

‘Then I will be responsible for my pain. I have told you how I came to be standing on the street. Now you must tell me how you came to be driving by.'

There was no avoiding her question. If they were to die, she deserved to know why. And if they were to live, she deserved the opportunity to hate him. His every instinct cried at him to lie to her, to lose the story in a tangle of invention, but he would not. Could not.

Tristan and Grace's Story

Tristan lifted his face from the dirt and snorted his nose free of vomit. Her window remained completely dark, but the memory of what he had seen could not be extinguished. He stood, but the world around him refused to settle. He swayed, uncertain. Wear your fate well, the rector had said, but that made no sense. Who was to say it was not his fate to fall back to the ground and die? How should such a defeat be worn? He lurched forward, his legs somehow aware of the need to move. He stumbled on. Not towards a future, but away from her. Away from the pain.

He found a low bridge and crept beneath it. He fell asleep as the sun rose, to the sounds of the occasional delivery truck rumbling overhead and a solitary bird singing to the daylight. When he woke again the sky had dimmed and his head throbbed from thirst and discomfort. Self-pity hung about him, but he needed to drink and that meant moving. He pissed into the dirty river then scrambled back to the road. He stood there waiting for some plan to take hold of him, listening for the familiar murmur of forming thoughts. His head though was quiet, as if his soul had returned to the hiding place. He looked over the side of the bridge and watched a discarded can float slowly past, tied to the black water's ooze.

He remembered the envelope the rector had given him and opened it. There were papers and money as well as an address. He knew the street; it ran close to the docks and old warehouses still remaining from the days commerce ran the river.

The address led him to a building that had once served as the headquarters of a grain merchant and, according to its tarnished plaque, had stood for more than a century as a memorial to hungry endeavour. Now it was reduced to a warren of bricks, a maze in which every turn took the visitor a little further from the reach of God. Tristan presented his papers and explained that he needed to leave the City. A man with thick lips and unruly eyebrows checked the money and shook his head.

‘It's barely enough.'

It was a bad lie smoothed by habit, but Tristan had no energy for arguing. He was taken to a holding room until the next night fell and then smuggled past the gates in the back of a truck that bumped and rattled its way across the empty land.

Tristan would never forget the moment he arrived in the heathen settlements. He stood where the truck had left him, fractured and uncomprehending. He had never seen so many people. The landscape wriggled with life like a leg of meat infested with maggots. It seemed that light and noise spilled through every crack. Tristan had been raised in a world where electricity was rationed and yet here, less than two hours of rutted track away, it was as if they struggled with a mighty surplus that had to be unloaded hot and buzzing into the streets before the whole place exploded.

The smugglers had provided Tristan with clothes. They were tatty but didn't mark him as an outsider. It felt unnatural to have shoes on his feet and he scuffed along the footpaths with the slack-jawed wonderment of a junkie. Great towers stretched up into the sky and soon his neck ached from looking up at them. He stopped at a shopfront window and looked at a display of television screens, each reduced to the fuzzing of the late-night disconnection. The unpat-terned static provided a comfort of sorts and he stood numb before it.

Soon he realised he was not alone. Another man at the far end of the shopfront watched the same spectacle. For five empty minutes neither of them spoke. The other man's clothes and skin were filthy. But then he smiled and Tristan almost cried with gratitude.

‘That there's the big bang,' the stranger said, ambling forward and nodding at the screens. ‘The static. It's the background radiation from the beginning of time itself. Now it's everywhere, a broken signal that can never be put back together. Beautiful, isn't it.'

‘I too have broken apart,' Tristan said. It was all he had, his leaky truth.

‘It happens to us all, brother,' the man replied. ‘My name is William. Do you have a place to sleep tonight?'

Tristan shook his head, neither hopeful nor wary. He simply was. Life would happen to him now and he would let it, at least until the point where the sadness overwhelmed him.

‘Then neither do I,' William chuckled. ‘Do you have any drink on you?'

Again Tristan shook his head.

‘Ah, well there's a bigger problem. My name is William.'

‘You already told me that.'

This news seemed to trouble the man.

‘Have we met before?'

‘No.'

‘Well then, I don't see how I could have told you.' He eyed Tristan suspiciously.

‘My mistake.'

William had once been a tall man. If he straightened to look the world in the eye he could be tall again. But he stooped further as he moved away, his feet planted wide as if each moved in opposition to the other. He turned back to Tristan.

‘Are you coming or aren't you?'

Tristan shrugged and followed, and so his first night in the heathen settlements did not kill him.

‘I lived long enough to find you. For that we can blame William, or the big bang, or any point in between.'

She said nothing. He couldn't tell if she was still listening and perhaps it no longer mattered. He was rolling now, tumbling down the slope of their final chapter.

William led Tristan to the basement of a parking building where a group of homeless people had staked their claim. A fire burned in a drum and twenty or so figures circled in a dance of attraction and repulsion, drawn to the warmth yet wary of one another, each as uncertain as an electron, as sensitive to observation.

Planted on the only piece of furniture Tristan could see, a once-stately couch now grown humble, was a woman so fat she may well have been stranded. Two boys some years younger than Tristan sat one on either side of her swollen ankles, their jealous eyes on the pile of junk that served as fuel for the fire. The massive woman softly patted their heads and Tristan was sure he heard purring.

‘Fat Annie,' William whispered as they approached. Tristan did not know if he was sharing a joke or explaining her proper title.

‘This is Tristan,' William announced, as if presenting his queen with a captured prize from a distant land. She looked Tristan up and down. He felt nothing but weariness and a thick fuzzy sense of disconnection, as if he was descending into a dream.

‘What brings you here?' asked the queen. Her voice was melodic, a throatful of notes resonating in her enormous bosom. Her eyes shone bright within fleshy caves.

‘My life,' Tristan answered, not trying to amuse her but nonetheless bringing forth a laugh that gurgled its way up the scale.

‘Then you have stories to tell,' Fat Annie said. ‘Come, sit beside me.'

That there was no space into which Tristan might settle seemed to cause Annie no concern. Tristan edged cautiously forward and she made a great show of shifting her bulk to the side, although this was ultimately as hopeless as pushing water from the shore. He sat and felt her great mass spill back over him.

‘This is cosy,' she giggled. ‘Tell me, where are you from?'

‘The City of God,' Tristan answered. He saw no point in lying. He saw no point in anything. She grasped his knee in delight.

‘I knew it.' Fat Annie raised her voice so the others could hear her. ‘People, we have an angel amongst us. Come and listen to his stories.'

Seven or eight of them shuffled her way: curious, suspicious, perhaps resenting Tristan's place on the throne. Fat Annie produced a bottle of dark liquid and after swigging heavily offered it to Tristan. It burned his throat, his stomach and his head. He thought vaguely that she might be poisoning him; his head felt light and unpossessed. His story stuttered forth.

The street people were a credulous, encouraging audience. They appeared fascinated by the strange otherness of life in the City and would not let him skimp on details. Tristan told them what he could of St Augustine's, the rector and the experiments, and they grunted and wheezed their understanding. As Tristan's story unfolded, a small hope rose in him. Perhaps these strangers would expose the rector's tricks and free him from his failure. But that wasn't where their interest lay. It was Tristan's despair they found comfort in and, as the night grew small and the bottle emptied, Tristan found something similar in theirs.

It was the oddest feeling: a procession of filthy strangers making sounds of comfort and tapping him on the back as they dispersed, their eyes deep with a sadness he didn't recognise. They were welcoming him, he realised.