Daylight on Iron Mountain (50 page)

Not bad going
, he thought, looking about him,
for a man who’d lost everything
.

It was some while since he’d thought about it, but today, for some reason,
it had all come flooding back. That first day of his new life. That fated day when he had walked into the village and been taken in by them. Tom and Mary and all the rest. His friends. The best friends he’d ever had.

Maybe it was that dream of Corfe that had set this off – this brooding, sentimental mood – but he could not shake it.

Across from him, Peter was talking about how his employers, GenSyn, had survived the Collapse. How Tsao Ch’un’s man, Chao Ni Tsu, had selected a small elite of companies, buying stock heavily in the weeks before the Collapse to keep them afloat; maintaining them as going concerns until the time came when they could be useful again, in the reconstruction.

It wasn’t something that was generally known, not something the authorities particularly wanted known, but it wasn’t forbidden. Not like most of it.

Jake’s thoughts drifted momentarily.

In his head he could see it vividly: could see the slope below the farmhouse, the land stretching away to the sea, which lay there in the bright morning sunlight like a sheet of beaten brass. And halfway down, almost hidden by the vegetation, Ma Brogan’s house. Sweet woman that she’d been.

He sighed, then looked to his son again. Did Peter ever think of that? Did he remember
anything
of those years? Or was it gone, no traces left, erased as if it had never been, the tape wiped?

The conversation had moved on. Now they were talking about the new biography of Tsao Ch’un that had come out a month or so ago. ‘A Reassessment’ as it had been subtitled, published with the Ministry’s permission. A regular monster of a book, more than a thousand pages long. Jake had seen a copy of it on the kitchen table. Peter’s probably. It was a runaway bestseller and several of the family had read it. There was to be a TV series. But…

May he rot in hell…

The truth was, Jake didn’t want to know
why
Tsao Ch’un had done what he did. The only thing that mattered was the suffering he’d caused, and no apologist could excuse that. Suffering on a scale that was unimaginable. And the deaths…

The whispered ‘truth’ was that four billion had died to get Tsao Ch’un’s City up and running. Four billion. The thought of it was staggering. And now they wrote books on him, reassessing his life and motives. As if one could reassess such a monster.

Jake looked down. He could do with a drink. Only his children conspired to keep him from drinking these days, lest he ‘embarrass himself’.

Embarrass you, more like…

He looked across again, noting the animation in Peter’s face as he talked. He’d been a good son all these years. The very model of filial piety. That was just it. Peter had absorbed this world. Had become an intrinsic part of it, from hairstyle and mannerisms down to the silken
pau
he wore. More Han than the Han.

‘Peter…?’

Peter turned and looked to him, smiling. A smile of infinite tolerance. ‘Yes, Dad?’

‘Do you ever think of Boy?’

It was not the kind of question one should ask. Only he felt compelled. He wanted to know.

‘
Boy?
’

Jake held his son’s eyes a moment, then looked away. He didn’t remember. He genuinely didn’t seem to remember.

Your dog
, he wanted to say.
Don’t you recall? You loved that dog and they shot it. Those bastards killed it without a thought. Those bastards you work for now. Those same bastards who won’t let you wear denim or listen to rock music.

It was unsayable. It was all unsayable. Like in that Ray Bradbury novel. What was it called now?

He shook his head. ‘It’s okay, lad. It doesn’t matter…’

Even if it does…

Peter watched him a moment, smiling still. A smile of infinite tolerance and respect. Not a Western smile at all. Oh, Jake knew his son loved him. There were endless little kindnesses that testified to such. But it was in a Han fashion, like everything in their world.

How he yearned for something pure, something untainted. A broad West Country accent, maybe, or a jug of ale – real ale – something peppery and strong and not the processed piss they served up as beer in this great world of levels.

One couldn’t buy such things, not for a prince’s fortune.

Jake eased back a little, letting his head press back into the silken cushions and closing his eyes, as if he were dozing. But he was wide awake now. Not sleepy in the least.

So just what DO you remember?

It was a game he played a lot these days. To fill the void and stop himself from slowly losing touch.

The idea was a simple one. He had to remember ten things he had forgotten. To go down into that dark labyrinth of the mind and haul them out into the glare of the sun,
remembered
.

Like the Jesuits long before him, he set himself strict rules. For a start, nothing could be ‘remembered’ twice. The point of it was, after all, to recover ‘new’ memories. To dredge up fragments that, until that moment, had been lying there hidden, discarded in the dark.

Yes, and to reverse the flow. To counter that great drift towards forgetting, if only in my own head.

To begin with, he was to allow himself only two musical referents. Beside which were four other specific categories – art, film, books and sport. That left four slots for more general remembrances. Things from history, or science maybe, or…

The first came to him at once. A memory of the US President, Barack Obama, on the steps at his inauguration, standing where Martin Luther King had stood before him to give his landmark speech. Back when there’d been black men in the world. Before the Han had erased them.

Jake sighed, for as so often was the case, the memory came to him not pure and isolated, but embedded in some other thing. That was the thing about memory.

He could recall where he’d been when he’d seen that ancient footage. Could see the big old television set in the corner of his grandparents’ living room, could smell the musty smell of that house.

He had always been sharp of mind. That was what had made him such a good web-dancer. But for a long time he had not exercised those skills. The long years since had eroded something of his sharpness.

He relaxed, concentrating, letting his mind do what it did best.

A work of art… something… Dutch?

It came to him at once, and with it the memory of actually seeing it, facing him across the room, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The canvas had been massive, the figures life-size. They had spent a long weekend there in Amsterdam, he and Alison. He remembered walking right up to the painting. Remembered standing there, staring into those thick layers of paint,
as if he might step through into the canvas itself.

Rembrandt… The Nightwatch…

Which brought his third, and with it, in his head he heard the sound of an electric violin and thought of a drunken afternoon spent in the company of Old Josh, King Crimson’s
Starless And Bible Black
blaring from the speakers. West Country boys, as Josh liked to remind anyone who’d listen.

Jake smiled, recalling Josh’s face. That mischievous smile he sometimes had…

And focused again. A book this time, maybe. Something unusual…

He had it at once, almost as if the book itself had leapt out from the shelf into his hand.

In his mind he turned it, studying the orange and white cover. Such a slender, magical little book it was.

Chinua Achebe…
Things Fall Apart
.

He remembered finding it on one of the shelves in the hallway of the house in Church Knowle, intrigued by the writer’s name. Remembered how he’d meant to sample a paragraph or two and put it back, and how he’d spent the rest of the day curled up on the old sofa in the back room, immersed in Achebe’s evocative little tale of clashing cultures.

Back when Annie was alive…

He felt a hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him.

‘Dad?’

Jake looked up, half startled. ‘Wha…? Oh… oh, it’s you, Meg. I thought…’

For a moment he had been back there. For a moment…

‘I thought you might like to go inside for a bit, Dad. Have a little lie down before the guests arrive.’

It was kind of her. Thoughtful even. Only he didn’t want to go back inside. He was quite happy where he was, lost in his memories. But he knew what they were thinking. If he got tired he’d get cranky. So best let him have an hour or two before the party got going.

‘All right, sweetheart,’ he said, letting her help him up out of the chair. ‘You finished doing the food?’

She smiled and took his arm, leading him through. ‘Don’t worry, Dad. It’s all done. Looks lovely, it does. We’ve really done Mum proud, see if we haven’t.’

He nodded, sure that what she said was true. Except that wasn’t what he
wanted to ask. Looking at her, he felt something else bubble up out of the darkness.

‘Meg?’

‘Yes, Dad?’

‘I…’

He stopped, his mouth suddenly dry. His eyes met hers briefly, wide, startled eyes that stared out of his old face.

‘Dad?’

He looked away, giving the vaguest little shrug.

Inside, in the shadows of the guest room, he let her take off his slippers and get him stretched out on the bed. Then, with a peck on the forehead, she was gone, leaving him alone.

Jake lay there, staring up into the dark.

For one crazy moment he had been about to ask her how it had felt all these years, watching her sisters give birth to child after child, while she…

He hesitated to say it, even in his own head, but the words still came.

While she was barren…

Not that she seemed bitter. Of all Tom’s girls, she had been closest to him, a real darling of a daughter-in-law and now that she was older, the very image of his own Annie.

When he thought about it, he couldn’t believe that she didn’t rage against her fate, at some deep and instinctive level, the same way he raged against his. That she masked her childlessness in the same way that the rest of them masked their past lives; hiding them away, lest they prove too damaging.

Forgetting. Yes. It was all a process of forgetting.

Jake put out his hand and found hers, there in the darkness next to him. Closing his fingers about hers, he lay there, eyes shut, listening to her breathing.

Somewhere, far off, there were noises, but it could have been a thousand miles away.

Or a hundred fathoms deep.

He wanted to talk to her, to tell her how she had kept him sane all these years; how, without her there to whisper to in the darkness, he would have gone mad.

No, he would not have survived, head games or otherwise. It would have been a slow suffocation. Death by inches.

Yes, and even the word was banned now. Inches and feet, yards and furlongs, bushels and pecks… It was all
chi
and
sheng
now. The conquest complete.

For a moment he drifted. Unaware of what he was doing, he began to hum a tune.

And stopped. Was he imagining it, or had he once sat in a bar, somewhere downlevel, listening to some weird hybrid of traditional Han music and Western rock? What had that been about? Some strange experiment, perhaps – an attempt to soften the blow? If so, it hadn’t lasted long, for the music they played now on the radio was totally Han, and thus totally anodyne – a mixture of traditional music, cloyingly sweet pop and stirring martial themes.

Piss poor the lot of it!

It was like this latest business with TV. According to the authorities, next year was the four hundredth anniversary of television. Four hundred! It was laughable. Completely laughable. Only no one was laughing. According to the powers-that-be, television
had
been invented back in 1699. It was ‘a fact’.

And that was it. That was what made him catch his breath. The sheer audacity of it all. The lie so huge it seemed impossible to swallow. Yet swallow it they had.

It almost made him laugh. Only what was there to laugh at? Some days it felt as if he were living in a mental institution. But it wasn’t he who was insane.

Mary’s breathing changed.

She was silent briefly. Then, in a whisper, ‘
Jake?
’

He felt her fingers squeeze his own. Felt their warm presence in the dark, solid and familiar. Unmistakably hers.

He whispered back. ‘
What is it, my love?
’

‘
Are we really here, or are we dreaming this?
’

He laughed quietly. ‘
You too, eh?
’

‘
Only…
’ She stopped. For a moment he thought, perhaps, she’d gone to sleep again. Then, ‘
Only my dreams seem more real sometimes than this
.’

He smiled. So it was. And this strange congruence of feeling between
them – who, back then, would have guessed it would develop? More like mind-reading than conversation.

‘
Mary…?
’

‘
Yes, my love?
’

‘
I was back there today. In Corfe. Up on the ridgeway.
’

‘
In the sunlight?
’

‘
Yes…
’ He laughed. ‘
In the sunlight. I…
’ Jake hesitated, then squeezed her hand again. ‘
Tom was with me. He had his walking stick with him. You know… the one with the carved ram’s head.
’

For a moment he wondered if he’d said too much. If he ought to have kept Tom out of it. But Mary seemed to sense that too.

‘It’s okay,’ she said, speaking quietly but no longer in a whisper. ‘You didn’t steal anything from him, Jake. Tom was Tom. He gave me my girls, yes, and lots of wonderful memories. But you’re you, and you added to what I had. Immeasurably. I’d not have had it different.’

‘No?’

‘Not a thing.’

For a moment he lay there, his heart swollen by her words, feeling pride and love and a thousand other things. So life had been.

Jake squeezed her hand. ‘Well, old girl… shall we rejoin the others?’