Empty Space (41 page)
Authors: M. John Harrison
She picked up the phone.
‘Anna!’ she greeted Anna’s answering service. ‘Look, I’ve got some exciting news. I went to see Brian Tate yesterday. He’s still alive. Still living in the
same house in North London. He’s been teaching physics at a school in Walthamstow for thirty years. He’s reluctant to talk to me about what happened, of course. That’s
understandable. But I think he might talk to you. Anna, I think it would do you the world of good to talk to someone else who knew Michael—’
There was a dull clattering sound at the other end of the line, and a half-familar voice said:
‘Hello? Hello? Who’s this?’
‘Anna,’ said the doctor. ‘I’m so relieved! I thought—’
‘It’s not Anna,’ said the voice, ‘it’s her daughter.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m sorry, but Anna’s dead.’
Helen Alpert stared at the phone.
‘Oh dear,’ she said. She couldn’t think what to add. ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry about that. Is this Marnie?’ She couldn’t remember if there was another
daughter. All she could remember about Anna’s relationship with Marnie was its elegantly unconscious symmetries. Anna, constructing the daughter as a failed adult, had defused
Marnie’s early sexuality by pressing upon her the role of dowdy, unfulfilled helper; later this had encouraged Marnie to treat her mother as an ageing child whose narcissistic demands were
a burden. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ she said again.
‘It was a stroke,’ Marnie said. After a pause, she added: ‘Was there something? I’m quite busy at the moment.’
‘No, no. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Do send your bill, won’t you?’ Marnie said.
Helen Alpert said she would.
At the age of six Marnie Waterman wanted to be married. She believed this would happen when she was twenty-one, as the inevitable consequence of reaching that age. She would
also have horses and drive a car. Another inevitable consequence was: she would be tall. Though she had no plan for bringing it about, the future seemed already there for her, a dreamy thing
with pre-loaded contents. At seven she said to anyone who asked: ‘I’ll
cer
tainly travel.’ Ten years old saw her adding an image of herself in blocked pink satin shoes;
although this, out of shyness, she kept private. Around that time the Chinese economy collapsed and everything else went with it. Media dubbed it ‘the perfect storm’. Like most of
the other fathers in Wyndlesham, Tim Waterman had put up the hurricane shutters a year or two in advance. They were one of the lucky families, he explained when Marnie was thirteen:
nevertheless a lot of things fell out of her future around then. Outside Wyndlesham, stagflation wrote itself over everything like graffiti. Peak oil had come and gone. No one knew how to blow
the next bubble. The financial sector, stunned by the discovery that money had been as postmodernised as everything else, passively allowed the state to clip its wings. Bankers seeking
explanations read Baudrillard forty years too late. Bonuses tanked. A few footsoldiers got jobs in the remaining heartlands of the industry, where they found competition fierce. Families like
Marnie’s still drove everywhere, but their Range Rovers and Audis went unreplaced year on year; and though their incomes remained good they felt hard-up. Adults were forced to find new
ways of viewing the idea of success; children were having to mature earlier. Some of them felt resentful about that. Sharp divisions appeared at the upper end of the middle class. Suddenly your
parents could afford the Wyndlesham cheese shop or they couldn’t: Marnie’s cohort found itself defined by this. In her mid-to-late teens Marnie revised the contents of the future,
but she still expected it to bring itself about. Meanwhile, her father began to look tired, then died without warning of pancreatic cancer. Luckily he’d protected the family from that
too. Marnie, nineteen and a half, came home to the funeral by train – a long, grinding journey through a landscape composed of empty industrial estates and abandoned parking structures
– to find Anna sad but also frisky. They spoke about how free she felt, but it turned out she hadn’t made any plans either. All that time, Marnie had been doing well at a good
university, though when her twenty-first birthday arrived she turned out not to be married after all; towards the end of graduation year she accepted a job offer from one of the emerging mutual
associations.
Looking back on it all now, she felt that so far her life had been demanding but satisfactory. Women only ten years older than her, encouraged to remain adolescent until they were thirty, had
failed to make the transition from the liquid world: they seemed brittle when they had what they wanted, spoiled and bitter when they didn’t. The younger ones, struggling to avoid the
underclass enclaves of Eastbourne and Hastings, were simply worn down. At twenty-eight, by contrast, Marnie had charge of herself. Though money was no longer a serious career, ‘the New
Economics’ – cautious, simplified and heavily shifted to the co-operative – brought her security. A single mother since her last year at uni, she found herself able to rent a
small house well away from the chaotic suburbs; her employer financed childcare until Enny Mae was five, then a nice school. Marnie could afford medical insurance. She still saw Enny Mae’s
father, a man called William. Once or twice a year they had a talk. They were making sure that whatever future the little girl imagined for herself, a plan was put in place for achieving it.
Anna, recognising Enny Mae as competition, had never shown much interest; to avoid fractiousness and tantrums, Marnie had learned to keep them apart.
That was how things had rested until this morning.
Marnie put the phone down on Helen Alpert, stared out of the window of the Coldmorton Lane house, which she supposed was now hers, and wondered what would happen next. She
had woken eager to share her test results with Anna, suddenly able to feel happy after the inexplicable anxiety-states of the night before (in which relief at being cancer-free was somehow
overpowered by the dread of a completely new future – one into which the possibility of cancer had now been firmly embedded): but Anna had somehow evaded her again, deftly remaining the
absent parent to the end. Marnie felt weightless. It was too early to collect Enny Mae from school; to obviate further changes in his lifestyle, James the cat had eaten hastily and hidden himself
under a wardrobe. Marnie washed Anna’s supper things at the sink – there was a dishwasher but she couldn’t bring herself to run it – then wandered around the living area.
Anna still owned books. In them, the self figured largely: self-help books of thirty years ago, novels about women finding themselves, a book of photographs entitled
Events of the Self
;
even books by a man calling himself Self. She turned on the TV – found only news of the Indian reoccupation of Pakistan – turned it off again.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, she caught someone hanging about in the garden. He was a boy of about sixteen, somewhat shorter than Marnie, dressed in tight grey jeans rolled halfway up his
calves. His white T-shirt was too small for him, his black lace-up boots were covered in hardened dribbles and spots of yellow and pink enamel paint. With him he had a small dog, a kind of
long-legged Border terrier, sand-coloured, with short, bristly hair and scruffy-looking ears. Boy and dog stood in the middle of the lawn. Both of them seemed fascinated by the wreckage of the
summerhouse.
Marnie rapped on the window.
‘Excuse me,’ she called. ‘Excuse me! Can I help you?’
He didn’t seem to hear. Marnie went out on to the lawn and marched up behind him. ‘Excuse me!’ she called again, perhaps more loudly than she had intended. ‘Do you mind
if I ask what you’re doing here?’
He jumped in surprise. His face had a raw appearance, as if he lived up on the Downs somewhere in the constant blustery wind. His arms were stringy and tough. ‘I don’t know what
you think,’ he said, ‘but I’ve come to do some work for a woman who lives here.’ He stared expectantly, then, when Marnie failed to reply, offered ‘She’s an
older woman. She’s lived here years. She does her shopping down in Wyndlesham.’ He made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. ‘Some people like her, some
don’t. She’s got some work she needs doing.’
‘What kind of work?’
It wasn’t much, the boy said: it was just some painting.
‘I don’t live far,’ he said. ‘She said if I called, I could do the work she needed.’
‘There’s no work here. No one wants any work done here.’
The boy tried to take this in; for him, Marnie could see, the meaning of it lay fully in the words, divorced from body language or tone of voice. ‘She does her shopping down in
Wyndlesham,’ he said, as if this explained anything. ‘She likes a pint of Harvey’s.’ He wiped his left forearm across his face. His dog barked suddenly, a small but
sharply cut sound that went across the garden like the cry of some less well-known animal. ‘This new bitch of mine,’ the boy told Marnie, ‘I got her from them down the estate.
Some say she’s dangerous, but I know she’s not.’ Forelegs braced, its little bristly face sniffing the air, the dog appeared too small, too willing, to be a danger to anyone.
Every so often it would gaze up at Marnie or the boy, seeking confirmation of the things it saw. Yes, Marnie wanted to explain: this
is
grass. It’s a lawn. And that’s a tree,
with a pigeon in it. And that, which used to be my dad’s Russian-looking summerhouse, that’s a pile of wood: quite right. This morning my mum died. It was just like her to die without
any clothes on, half in and half out of a Russian summerhouse, and be found by firemen. You can tell a lot about her from that. I don’t know, she thought suddenly, what Enny Mae’s
going to say.
‘You don’t need worry about this bitch,’ the boy said. ‘She wouldn’t harm a child.’
‘What kind of dog is it?’
The boy gave her a sly look. ‘A working dog,’ he said. ‘An older woman lives here, her name is Anna. She said she had some work she wanted done.’
‘There’s no work,’ Marnie said. ‘I don’t know who you are, but whatever you thought you’d get from her it isn’t here.’
She added: ‘No one lives here now but me.’
The boy blinked. ‘She’s supposed to live round here somewhere,’ he said; then, accepting the situation suddenly, lunged away across the lawn. His shoulders were hunched, his
torso compressed and tense, but his stride had a loose, loping quality; the upper and lower halves of him, it seemed, had little experience of each other. The terrier followed, yapping and
gambolling, nibbing at his heels for attention. Up at the house, he stopped and fumbled with the side-gate latch. ‘If I did the work, I wouldn’t have to go to the toilet here,’
he promised. ‘I’d go in the village.’ Marnie, completely unable to interpret this plea, felt that they were misunderstanding one another to a degree that could only be her
fault.
She likes a pint of Harvey’s
. Where her mother had met the boy, or how, she preferred not to think.
‘Wait!’ she called. ‘Wait a moment.’
If he wanted work, he might as well deal with the mess Anna had made of the bathroom. He looked strong enough.
The next day, waking in the startled recognition that she had dreamed one of Anna Waterman’s dreams, Dr Helen Alpert threw a single worn item of Mulberry soft luggage
into the rear seat of the Citroën, cancelled her appointments for the near future and closed the consulting room. By four that afternoon, having used up almost a fortnight’s fuel
coupons, she was in Studland on the Dorset coast. There, despite the sea wind, the smell of salt, the herring gulls sideslipping in and out of the turbulent air above Great Harry rocks, she found
that the dream wouldn’t be shaken off.
In it, all her belongings had gone missing from an old-fashioned writing bureau she was using, while, crammed into its hidden drawers and on to its complicated little shelves, she found items
the thief had left in return. These stale wrapped sandwiches and bits of half-eaten fruit made her as anxious as she was disgusted. She was afraid he might come back at any moment. The place
itself was shabby, half-exterior – the ground floor, possibly the only floor, of a gutted house still in use during some long, slow crisis, some failure of human or political confidence.
The doorways had no doors. The windows, though intact, were uncurtained. It was always raining. Damp had got into the furniture – mainly cheap veneered cabinets and shelves from which the
varnish had been bleached by sunlight and use – and the walls were covered with fibrous, scaly-looking, ring-shaped blemishes. Looking up at the wall beside a doorway, Helen saw that a
slightly more than life-sized vulva had emerged from it like a crop of fungus. It wasn’t quite the right colours. The labia had yellow and brown tones, and the startling rigidity of a
wooden model. A body was attached, but less of that had emerged from the wall. It was still emerging, in fact, in very slow motion. She felt that it might take years to come through. And while
the vulva clearly belonged to an adult, the body was much younger. It still had the fat little belly and undeveloped ribcage of a child. The vulva presented in the same vertical plane as the
wall, but the body and the face were somehow foreshortened and leaning back from it at a wrong angle for the anatomy to work. At all points it was seamless with the wall. She couldn’t see
much of the face, but it was smiling. In the dream, Helen began to make a shrieking sound, full of the most appalling sense of grief and horror. She could hear herself but she couldn’t
stop.
It was so clearly all of a piece, she thought: the loss or substitution of her possessions, the decayed building open to the elements but still usable, the body emerging seamlessly from the
wall in very slow motion. On waking she had experienced spatial confusion; remained dissociated well into the morning. Even now, staring out across the titanium-coloured water of Studland Bay,
where a small white boat was chewing its way towards the grey horizon, she felt as if she hadn’t quite re-entered herself. She felt as if, down inside, vital parts of her had separated. She
felt that something had broken in her personality – had broken, perhaps, some long time before – but that she would never be able to understand what.
