SYLVIE'S RIDDLE (13 page)

Owen found himself at a loss for words. He simply smiled and the old man smiled back.

'You'd be surprised how many people lose the power of speech when I'm around.'

'Only wish you had that effect on bloody Nathaniel out there.'

*

That evening Owen played the videos and DVDs of his own work, all except one. Each time a new setting came into view, he was there. He wasn't at home; he was there. A night in Zurich, and the club where the female entertainers doubled as hostesses. They had had to keep the camera hidden, though at least one of the girls had cottoned on to what they were doing within half an hour. They had slipped her an extra hundred francs. She made sure the camera saw plenty of thigh. Then the Corbusier House, and its orientally low tables. Swiss mountains as the train ran along beneath them, then the suddenness of the grid of streets in New York, Manhattan reaching for the skies. The traffic's entrance to Tokyo, as though the camera were entering a vast concrete car-park. Punts along the Cam, a weedy, willowy, watery progress to nowhere in particular. Dark skies over northern cities, millstone grit houses in despairing rows. Children with large Indian eyes, beseeching the weather to go away for ever. Batting and
bowling with an upturned milk-
crate for a wicket.

A scene off the western coast of Ireland. He remembered filming that, he could even feel the boat still lurching beneath him. Johnny had kept them out there for six hours, for he could be demanding too: he knew precisely what he wanted. And what he wanted here was the right light. The camera assistant had retched three times over the side, and the Irish skipper had remained grimly smiling, barely saying a word to anyone. Johnny wanted the light for that sequence to be right, and wouldn't consider turning back to harbour until they had it on film. Wharfedale at dawn, looking as though the mist might wreathe itself into a ghost. Finally he couldn't take any more. Owen felt as though an orgy of images had been rioting inside him. He'd kept putting o
ne film in after another, fast-f
orwarding, halting, taking out the tape, then trying a different one. He had no idea where Sylvie was. At midnight he finally phoned the Institute. Answering machine.

'It's Owen. Hope you're well. I'm going for a drive.'

He drove in the dark to Snowdonia. Edged his way up a starvecrow road. Stopped on a hilltop. Stared up at the sky to see the plough. It occurred to him that you would be able to see that at the same moment from a bothie on the west coast of Scotland, wouldn't you? Right now. You'd see the very same thing. If you were a young woman with a ruined psyche. Starving to death as a matter of conviction.

At that precise moment, Henry Allardyce was dreaming. It was a terrible dream, but he had dreamt it so many times before that he almost knew his way through it. He already knew that this was a horror that would end. Florence was flooded as it had been four decades before. The Arno had set about drowning what was left of the Renaissance. Men waded in to their waists to heave out gilded pictures, as though seizing vast, glittering fish, subaquean treasures of silver and gold. The Amo merged with the Shropshire Severn in his dream, and his Picassos were sinking in the water. Henry was thrashing about, trying to get hold of the pictures, but they were drifting away from him. The vast creatures bellowed as they drowned. My minotaurs, Henry thought. No one ever taught them how to swim.

At the same time in Liverpool Sylvie was imagining the eye of a ghost, its lens a filament no thicker than gossamer, separating two kingdoms. That would have been what he'd be looking through then, if the ghost of John Lennon had come up the Mersey that night, a stow-away on a transatlantic liner, the stately progress like the bleb of a glacier, snouting its way in to the Albert Dock and then creeping up past Paradise Road and along to Rodney Street, swooping in through the window, one of those bats in Bram Stoker's
Dracula,
but making no noise, a quieter spirit now, there being no wars or shouting on the other side; only to discover Sylvie Ashton at her table in the Signum staring at his picture on her wall, and then resuming his domicile inside his photograph once more, that being where most ghosts take up residence sooner or later. There was something about Lennon's features and voice, the combination of the domineering, even bullying, look and manner, and the ceaseless vulnerability, that continually made Sylvie ponder things. Minotaur. The bellow in the cavern and then later the whimper as the steel shoots in. One life: a labyrinth.

She let Owen's message go on the answering machine, then crept over the corridor to listen at Hamish's door. Tap tap tap, sure enough. You could hear him snaring all incoming calls. Snooping little bastard.

'Good-night Hamish,' she called out gently. 'Sleep well.' Then
sotto
voce: 'You kilted wanker.'

Hamish's head was round his door before she could make it back.

'What? What did you just say?'

'I said good-night, Hamish. Sleep well. God's watching over you tonight, so thank Her.'

*

She lay in the dark and listened for the boats, as the ghost of John Lennon listened along with her up on her wall. So was she leaving Owen then, was she, finally up and off? Until his latest erasure she had been pretty convinced he had already left her. She had only been waiting for the announcement. Then instead there was ... all that. Alex.
Deva.
It struck her as curious: what an intermittent requirement sex could be. For her anyway. There had been a time at the beginning with Owen when it had been incessant. Come to think of it, Owen had continued pretty incessantly, but not always with her. Now what did Henry want? Henry wanted to be comforted, she reckoned. With red wine and warm embraces. That particular minotaur wanted his half-sister Ariadne to take out her famous bobbin, thread herself through the complications of his life to the centre of the riddle, and hold him tightly in the night while he moaned. Moaned and thrashed. He didn't want his bed to be a grave he shared with his dead wife. He wanted a resurrection girl in there to bring his darkness back to life. But she couldn't. She liked Henry but she didn't love him, and she wasn't old enough or desperate enough for money to pretend there was no difference any more. There was a difference. She had loved a husband once and the loving had exhausted her; but she was still not prepared to pretend there was no difference. But she couldn't afford to live in the house in Chester alone. Was that why she had started sleeping over here in Liverpool so often, trying out the alternatives? Seeing what life might be like without her lovely house? So what was to be done then? Buggered if she knew. Better get some sleep anyway. Tom Helsey was lecturing in the morning for her
Afterlife of Images
course, and she was slated to introduce him.

In the morning she emerged from the bathroom, having showered and put on her make-up. As she opened the door she saw Hamish in his dressing-gown, a towel over his arm, a look of practised impatience on his face.

'Morning Hamish.'

'If you are planning on staying over often, we'd better come to an understanding about washing arrangements and such-like in the morning.'

'We need more facilities, Hamish. An Institute of such distinction needs more than one bathroom, surely. I think you should have one entirely to yourself.'

The Burn Lecture

She was trying to explore different ways of imaging the world, different ways of lensing it, in the process abolishing distance, and as usual cancelling time, so she had invited Tom over from Physics. She'd heard he gave lively lectures. Never heard any herself She introduced him. He walked up to the podium smiling and switched on the overhead projector. A flaring image was illuminated on the screen. He started speaking.

'Once the collapse begins, then you know the real brightness must get started. A brightness compared to which every other lamp in your life was nothing but marshlight through drizzle. Now you will be needing those powers of ten you always thought were useless, only employed by scientists like me. Have a good look at this image. It'll scorch your sockets with zeroes. A supernova, even in its humdrum pre-celebrity status as mere star, was always a power to be reckoned with. Gravity might be the weakest of the four forces we believe control the universe, but it's still strong enough, believe me. Don't, whatever you do, underestimate it on your way home tonight. It's what brings us back to earth each time after our little excursions.

'Your subject, Sylvie has told me, is how we make images of the reality we find around us; how we contain inside the mind realities which are a billion times larger than the brain. We have to reduce the universe one thousand million million million million times to fit it insid
e our skulls. That's a serious
compression of the image. And then the image itself lives on and starts to change us.

'Once more we're back with that theme we never seem to escape for long: the biographical imperative. If you lived entirely inside a blue shade, then every reality you saw would be blue. And there would be no blue, since blue would simply be reality. Well we live inside biography, and so we assign births and deaths and careers to everything we encounter. From the carrot to the elephant; from a tiny satellite to the universe itself. And so we talk of "the life of stars", playing Boswell to the Great Cham of nature. We might even occasionally catch their births - a little dribble of light in the Orion Nebula signifying a beginning. One of the minor cosmic creatures announcing its nativity, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. Our own star, source of all life and warmth, the dear Sun we've so often worshi
pped as God, is already in mid-
career. The protons bum efficiently to helium, the material is consumed, the energy released. And so it goes on, most usefully for our present purposes, but not for ever of course. Each nucleic metamorphosis announces our mortality. If not quite yet, you'll be pleased to hear. We turn everything into biographies, we tell each other stories all the time, because we must die.

'But now imagine a star vastly more massive than our sun. It is burning, finding a tighter form of organization for itself, which is what all burning is. The difference between the looser and the tighter form, the trimmer atomic organization of its destination, is released as energy. Part of this energy turns into photons. Light. And from such concentrations of light in the night sky we constructed our first calendars; even fathomed our fates, pondered who and what we were. And where we were, how the years roll round us. No photons, no images.

'The gravitational force, a force too vast for anything but mathematics and poetry to approach, pulls in with relentless insistence. But the nuclear heart of the matter has a big enough reply as long as enough fuel is being pumped into its blazing furnace by the nano-second. Then at one moment, arriving at one infinitesimal iota of a dot in this gargantuan chronicle, the balance falters, by the smallest particle and for the briefest measure of time. That's all it takes. And as with us so with the planets too: life can go on for as long as it likes, but death only has its one good moment and so tends to make the best of it. There's a rage against the dying of the light.
In
a few milli-
seconds, gravity suddenly has more resources than the bum that's been for so many ages resisting it.

'The matter implodes, an object ten times the size of the Sun crashes towards its own nucleus. The force of its motion is so astounding that even the equations blink
–
the laws of nature seem to go briefly into reverse, though they haven't, of course. The mass impacts beyond its natural point of equilibrium, in and in it goes with such relentless momentum, such a vast elastic nightmare of distortion like a bowstring pulled in every direction at once until it hits the distended fulcrum-point and fires out a galaxy of light. WHOOSH. Enough light to annihilate all the darkness you've ever seen, or ever will.

'We're a long way off, don't forget that
–
a mathematical distance, which means so far away that not even a genius could truly imagine it. The rest of us simply keep on writing out the numbers. You'll need a lot of zeroes. Don't ever confuse calculation with imagining; we're touching the extremities here. But even so, even though we're so far away that we don't know whether to measure this distance in time or kilometres, and instead muddle through with a mixture of the two, confusing almost everyone in the process with our talk of light years, even so, at this moment, the human world catches its breath: old men with grubby beards climb out of bed and stare through the window in silence. They make a gift of the energy in their bare feet to the floorboards, and don't even notice. Tears fill their rheumy old eyes. They know that a new sort of king is to be born in the east. They stare at the sleeping face on the pillow and remember all the hope they once saw there. At least they have lived to see the longed-for portent. So now they can die with bright eyes.