Song Of Time (41 page)

“You’re destroying something that’s precious to us both!”

“No, Claude. That’s what
you
were doing in the house.” I still had the wrench in my hand. I lifted it higher, then brought it down hard across the DB’s bonnet, and metal shifted its tensions and gave a protracted groan.

“For God’s sake, stop, Roushana! This isn’t about this car. It’s about you and me. I can’t go on living like this with you—I can’t live in a fucking mausoleum!”

“Why not?”The wrench falls again; it has a will of its own.

“Because…
What
do you want me to be, Roushana.
Who
do you want me to be? Just tell me,and I’ll do it…I’d be whatever you want,but I need to
know
. I can’t read you mind—I never could. Do you want me to stop fucking someone? Is
that
what this is about? Or do you want me to start? I can do that as well. Who exactly
is
it that you want me to fuck, Roushana, because it sure as hell isn’t you…”

I nod. Once more, the wrench falls. My husband’s right about our sexual life, which has dried up in recent years. The energies we once directed in that way have found other channels. There’s been this car. Morryn as well. Then the kids. Always, always, music. The storm surges, the wrench falls, and the tang of wounded metal is salt-sharp as the blood-taste in my mouth.

“What
is
it, Roushana? I could be Leo. I mean, I’ve tried hard enough. Or I could be your fucking mother. I could even be the guy you once thought I was in Paris, or whoever else it is you think you see in whatever you really feel inside your head. I’ll be what you want me to be, Roushana. Just tell me who.”

He’s so
weak
. I feel faintly disgusted—with myself, and with him. Nauseous, as well, although perhaps that’s just the taste of sea and blood and metal. The image of the car blurs and redoubles as the wind sweeps in. So does the figure which might or might not be Claude. He’s right. He really could be anything—anyone. “All I want you to be,” I say patiently, “is the man I once thought I loved. That’s not so very much to ask, is it? What I don’t want you to be is some weak-willed victim—a half-decent pianist and failing conductor who’s going to flab and drinks too much. I don’t want you to be
pathetic
, Claude. And I’m sick of you being merely good, and I’m tired of what passes for our life together, and of being better at most things than you are, and then feeling that I ought to apologise. And I’m sick, above all, of this car. Just grow up, Claude, or go away and kill yourself like you sometimes say you will. But you can’t even manage that, can you? You can’t get anything right…”

The figure hunches, glowering. Time slows. This is like the moment when you become the thing you’re playing, when you and the music unite. There’s that same sense of pure inevitability, yet of having absolute control. This is how God must feel, I tell myself. I can do whatever I want. I can re-make or destroy him—and myself. I’m crystalline, I’m everything, and I’m held in the frozen moment, and endlessly looking down.

“You’re
nothing
, are you, Claude? You’re powerless. You haven’t even got the nerve, the self-belief to…But why don’t you do something properly for once, eh, and forget all the posturing? You’ve been longing to do it for enough years. All the throwings and the tantrums, the grab-bings and the pushings. All the yes Roushana no Roushana this Roushana that. All the pathetic sobbing and the wasted glass. But why, for just once in your life, don’t you do what you want to do, Claude? Why don’t you stop distracting yourself and trying to be everything and do something properly for a change? Why don’t you just hit me?”

It comes as a blur—as the bite of the rain, as the hammering storm, as more of the taste of salt. My head rings. This feeling is far too familiar to be strange, and yet the pain is as distant as I remain from myself. And then I hit him back—my hand has an amazing weight, a will of its own—and Claude crumples instantly, and I’m looking down on him and looking down on myself as I stand there holding the dripping, ticking wrench.

I’m still riding the moment, still in complete control, but this
now
is endless, the past and the present are one. Morryn’s seen it all, held it all, in the crystal of its granite bones, and I can see it, too, through its chim-neys and windows as an old woman and a young man struggle out from its maze of memories and down and out into the storm as if that were any escape. Perhaps they’re heading towards the garage, which I know has long been empty, and so does the frail and barely recognisable old creature I’ve somehow become. Wind and lightning crackle as she and Adam slip and slide across the wet lawns. Roushana’s weakening, but Adam carries her down the sluicing steps towards the boiling sea, just as she once carried him. Concrete crumbles, they almost fall. Then they are down beside the raging waves and the boathouse, part hewn-stone, part cliff, part cavern, Morryn’s last outreach, at which the sea tongues and mauls, lies ahead. Blinding white froth rolls out of the blackness, draws back, rolls in again. Shingle slides. The old causeway is mostly gone, but the place still clings to its rotted doors. Muscles bulk as Adam drags at its seaweed chains, then something gives and the door tumbles as drift-wood across the slate and granite sky.

The storm, the wind, rush greedily in, driving into a space which is barely sheltered, although something—a changed but familiar shape, sea-lit by roaring phosphorescence—bulks within. The DB now has barnacled eyes. Rotting weeds beard the radiator’s misshapen grin. The oystered bonnet rides up and the engine’s torn innards protrude their fronded lips within. The windshield’s the green-teethed maw of some dead, submarine predator, and the hanging doors are its broken fins. Its shines, darkens, with the thrust of the waves. A thing of the sea, it’s too beautiful to be ugly, too wonderful to be strange. This shipwrecked car is the essence of something—that’s what I and Morryn have both long known…

Things don’t need to be decided when you’re in this heightened state—I can tell that Claude’s dead as I stand in the garage even before I feel his pulseless chill as I stoop to touch the bared skin of his neck. There’s little blood—there’s little of anything apart from the strange indentation the wrench has made in the side of his skull—although I let out a sound, either a sob or a giggle, to think how ridiculously wrong and messy this scene is. I can’t leave things like this! After all, he’s Claude Vaudin, and I’m Roushana Maitland, and this is nothing like the way we ever were. Not to our kids, not to the world, not to anyone, and least of all to ourselves…

Moving quickly, slowly, I half–lift and manage to heave him in across the DB’s passenger seat as I elbow open the door. I get odd flashes as I slam it shut and move around to the driver’s side of the car. The DB’s panels already look sea-corroded, its windows are greened. The sea is everywhere, flooding in gleaming fingers as I climb in and fumble along the DB’s dashboard for the ignition key. I pull the choke, and
Young Americans
comes pouring out at full volume as the big engine roars until I claw at the buttons to make it stop.

Work the gears, work the clutch. A dance with feet and hands.
For fuck’s sake, Roushana, you’re wrecking the transmission…
This was never easy, and the DB bounces off the gatepost with a scream of hurt metal as I swing it out towards the road. Claude’s body is keeling against me—a massive weight I can’t believe I ever managed to lift—and I can’t see a thing. There. Wipers. Lights. Never did get that ejector seat, or the guns, but at least the road leaps out, blurrily illuminated through the thwacking blades. Tyres scream. The wheel’s heavy, and the DB continues sliding as I swing it to a halt on the verge above Bezant Bay and I’m losing control. But it stops, it stops, and the headlights gleam into nothing but wind-driven rain.

The storm hits me as I stumble out, and I’m so close to the drop that I can’t get around the front of the DB. The engine’s still rumbling as I fight the wind to open the passenger door, leaning in and putting my arms under Claude’s as I attempt to lift him over into the driver’s seat. My husband’s been bleeding—the hide and the carpets gleam dark in the dashboard lights—and the gearstick and the handbrake keep getting in the way. One huge effort, and he finally begins to shift. Almost easy now, and I can feel him pushing back against me.
Don’t ratchet the fucking handbrake, Roushana, you’ll wear it out…
I try to grip the thing to release it, but my hands are freezing and slippery with blood. Then it snaps down in one ferocious lunge and the car resumes its slide towards the rage of sea just as I fall back out and Claude lets out a bubbling groan.

Lights streaming, the DB sails off into the night. The tide’s high, pushed up by the autumn moon and tonight’s storm, and the car hits the waves head-on, falls back, exhausts still pluming, is lifted, turned. I start to scramble down scree and sheer rock just as its rear begins to stain the surface with blurs of red. I don’t know how long it takes, but suddenly I’m down in the waves. And I’m cold, cold, cold. I’ve lain down here on these summer rocks on days with the kids, but now I’m driven against them in a series of bruising shocks. Lost, gasping, I dive down. There it is, the DB, not so very far out, but sinking towards the swirling sand with its all lights glowing, its chromium wheels still turning. Silver-lit, mottled by churning shadows, it shifts and wavers with the beat of the storm. Its windscreen has broken in glittering shoals, and I kick towards it, rise into the roaring night, then dive again. Claude’s been pushed half-through onto the bonnet by the shock of the impact as the DB hit the sea, and he’s surrounded by a dark haze. Clawing my way down, I try to grab something, anything—flesh, hair, clothing—but my head is bursting. My lungs are ready to explode. Then, as I push back towards the surface, something cold and hard grips one of my legs. Looking down, all I can see is a haze of blood-darkness and the windshield’s glinting maw. I feel as if I’ve been caught by a predator, something which will drag me down into a last, terrible place. In a ferocious surge of failing energy, I kick myself away and start to rise.

The waves haven’t finished with me yet, but, finally, I haul myself away from them and crawl out onto the rocks. And I lie there for the longest time, shivering and gasping as the sea still breaks around me, sometimes almost clawing me back, staring up at the roiling sky as the storm slowly retreats, and wondering how difficult it is—to let go, to die, to drown…

THERE ARE OTHER CLINICS—PLACES WHICH DEAL with the living instead of the dead, and I took myself to visit my friend Adam in such a place this morning, travelling in one of those strange bubble-shaped cars which are everywhere nowadays, and helping myself out onto the wide, dizzying gravel with the aid of my walking stick. In fact, not so much a clinic as a large, pleasant, house, done in the same sort of understated Arts and Crafty style as many of the houses once were on the Calthorpe Estate, but this one sits at the lip of a glen which winds down to the sea and the wind sighs its Cornish breath over the tips of the bared trees. I was greeted, I think, by the woman who has greeted me here previously. A doctor, I believe, or at least of some kind of specialisation which involves humanity, she helped me into the hall and sat me down beside the crackling fire as Adam’s presence was sought out in some imperceptible way.

“You still have no better idea of who he was?” I asked, although what I could make out of her expression suggested that this was a question I’d asked too many times before.

“I don’t think we ever will, Roushana,” she replied—loudly, slowly, patiently, firmly, as one might when speaking to a child. “Nor am I sure that it would be a good idea if we did. Adam’s body has been wiped of every trace of identity, as has his mind—he was deliberately made into a blank slate. If he has any lingering memories, they wouldn’t be his, but those of the invading personality…”

I nodded my understanding. Before this lovely fire, I was drifting in warm haze, but yes—I
had
been told all of this before, or some-thing very much like it. Not that it’s permitted or legal, if such terms still mean anything, but there are tales, rumours—indeed, recorded cases—of attempts by the passed to regain possession of a new, living body. Such a thing could be purchased easily enough, I suppose, for flesh has always been cheap, and then, once it had been wiped of all traces of what it had previously been, it would undergo a more invasive version of the process which was inflicted on me. Crystal would spread across emptied synapses, grow between bone and sinew, and into that would be poured the memories and personality of a different being. Looked at like this, the whole concept doesn’t seem that difficult. Isn’t that what I nearly did myself—a different kind of possession? All it would take is an effort of will. And isn’t this exactly what Adam told me on that last night we spent together in Morryn?

“But what,” I still persisted, “happened to that dead person who took over Adam…” I allowed myself a mischievous pause. “Not supposed to say
dead
now, are we? Oh dear—and now I’ve gone and said it again.”

As the firelit woman beamed her understanding, I realised how I can get away with anything now, say fuck or shit or piss or any of the bad old words, or stand up and do a stupid jig for that matter, if I still could. “As I said, it’s strictly against all the protocols for a living body to be possessed by someone who has passed, and I understand that the technology is sketchy and unreliable at best. It’s highly likely that the invading personality was simply—well, I suppose
rejected by the host
would be the most obvious term. The data would be lost forever.”

“Then why did he come to me…?”

“Pure chance, most likely, although I suppose it’s possible the passed personality had some kind of connection with you or the area—that there was some trace of a memory drawing him on. I believe there are records of a confused young man showing up in Mevagissey a few days before you found Adam. Those rope bindings you said you saw around his ankles and wrists, and that nasty gash we found in his abdomen, may be evidence of some final crisis as the remnants of the invading personality fought against losing its host. And then, I guess, he managed to stumble on along the shore in pretty much the state you found him in— as you and he were detected and rescued on that night of the storm. But look—if you have any more questions, Roushana, you really don’t need me to answer them…”