The PowerBook (11 page)

My father had a supply of large glass jars with lead seals. He stored in these hydrogen peroxide, mercury, prussic acid, solutions of nitrate, ammonia. Hazardous liquids were not my domain and I was forbidden to go into the cellar.

One day, when my father was out collecting scrap, I took a flashlight and crept down the thirteen steps into the cellar. I told myself I wanted an apple. We kept them wrapped in newspaper through the winter. There they were, each by each on slatted racks, smelling the cellar of fruit and autumn.

I took my apple, folding the paper carefully because in scrap nothing can be wasted. We
were
waste.

Then I turned my flashlight onto the jars—the deep blue and pale green of the jars. Some were cloudy, one was red. I had no idea what any of them could be, for although I was secretly learning to read, my father wrote his labels as a chemist would—FE, H
₂
O, H
₂
N, NH
₂
, AS
₂
, O
₃
.

I went closer, standing on tiptoe, muttering the symbols to myself.

At the end of a row of jars coloured like dreams was an opaque jar with a heart drawn on it and a dagger through the heart. I put up my hand to touch it, and in that second my hand was grabbed from behind.

It was my father. He put his face close to mine, and I could smell the sulphur on him.

‘Never touch that jar. Never. If that ever gets loose we’re finished.’

‘What is it?’

‘Love,’ said my father. ‘There’s love in that jar.’

And so I discovered that love is a hazardous liquid.

One day I asked my mother.

‘Is there a world beyond here?’

She shook her head and stretched out her arms end to end.

‘Nothing but waste and scrap. The earth itself is nothing but a collection of belched rocks and burning gases. We live in a cosmic dustbin.’

‘Is the lid on or off?’

‘On. Nobody gets beyond the dustbin.’

‘Well, where’s the buried treasure then?’

Her eyes lit up like a couple of sodium street lamps. ‘That’s for
you
to find.’

At night, my father blazed up the fire with a can of petrol and my mother told stories from her youth. Her youth was like a far-off city where she had lived for a time and been happy. She had all the longing of an exile for a place where she could never return.

Like other exiles, her longing grew a narrative of its own. Her desire told itself as memory. Her past was a place that none of us could visit without her. It was the only kingdom she could control.

‘I used to live on a river,’ she said. ‘A river stocked so full with fish so fat that anyone who wanted to cross to the other bank just walked over the fishes’ backs as though they were stones.

‘In those days no one went fishing. No one had ever heard of fishing. If a housewife wanted a few brown trout for supper, she would take her skillet down to the river, and shout, “YOU, YOU AND
YOU,” and the fish would jump into the pan, tame as fleas.’

‘Are fleas tame?’ I said.

‘They were in those days,’ she said, and continued …

‘In those days, everyone carried a little handbell in their pockets, and if you wanted to speak to someone, you stood outside their door and rang your bell. The person inside would say, “Is that my bell I hear ringing?” and you would reply, “No, it’s not your bell, it’s mine.” Then they would say, “Well, if it’s not my bell, I won’t answer it,” and you would know you were not wanted, but if they said, “Well, well, since it’s your bell, I’ll answer it for you,” you would know you would be welcome.’

‘Where’s your bell?’ I said.

‘You’ll get it when I die,’ she said, and continued …

‘In those days, anyone hunting in the woods found buried treasure—only it wasn’t really buried—it was lying on the surface and there was such a lot of it.

‘I remember once walking out hand in hand with a boy I knew, and it was summer, and suddenly before us was a field of gold. Gold as far as you could see. We knew we’d be rich for ever. We filled our pockets and our hair. We were rolled in gold. We ran through the field laughing and our legs and feet were coated in yellow dust, so that we were like golden statues or a golden god. He kissed my feet, the boy I was with, and when he smiled, he had a gold tooth.

‘It was only a field of buttercups, but we were young.’

‘Will I ever be young?’ I asked my mother.

It was bedtime and my father was winding the clock.

‘You are young,’ said my father. ‘You won’t get any younger even if you clean your teeth twice a day.’

‘You’ll get older,’ said my mother, ‘that’s what happens.’

‘Then what happens?’

‘You won’t be able to find the treasure.’

‘Will I be too old to look for it?’

‘No, but you’ll be looking in the wrong place.’

‘Why doesn’t everyone find the treasure?’

‘Some people say there’s no such thing.’

‘That’s because they’ve never found it.’

‘And other people don’t know where to look.’

My mother and father both wore spectacles. I took my mother’s off her nose and tried to see through them. The world was blurred and strange.

‘I can’t see anything through these. Can you?’

My mother looked away, my father looked into the clock. There was a little beetle under the coalscuttle. There were three ebony elephants with ivory tusks on the mantelpiece. There was a brass cone for holding tapers. The bevelled mirror on its chain had come out of a better house than ours; its scrollwork was angel and streamers. By the fire was a tin bucket overflowing with old money and foreign coins—the kind of loot that fell out of dismantled seat webbing, or was tipped up from the backs of house-clearance drawers. None of it was worth anything, but we collected it anyway, and when my parents were brooding, one or the other would scoop up a handful of coins and throw them onto the fire, shouting, ‘Money to burn!’

I watched it burn. I watched the monarch’s heads bleed out their alloy, the cheap pre-war French francs bend and twist like silver foil. The best coins were the true copper pennies that burned from orange to blue—an Aladdin’s lamp blue, or the underside of dragon’s wings, or the green you get from goblins.

I loved the fire. The coals were my books. Heated to story temperature, they burst into flame and I read in them the stories that no one would read to me.

‘What can you see?’

It was my mother’s voice roaring from miles away. I shook out of my trance by the fire.

‘Another world.’

‘There isn’t one.’

I pointed to the road winding through the flames. She was angry with me.

‘The fire will be out soon enough. There’s nothing in the ashes but ash.’

She went to bed. My father went to bed too. They left me alone as they usually did, to sleep and half-wake by the dying fire. When the novelty of myself had worn off, they had given up tucking me
into my galvanised bed and I either went there or not, as I felt.

The fire was grey. The road was gone. I had to stay young. I had to look in the right place. I had to keep the fire going. I had to believe in the treasure. I had to find the treasure too.

In 1999 mountaineers on Everest found a body.

There was nothing unusual about that—Everest is grave to many. What was unusual is that the body had been missing since 1924 and had lain preserved and unnoticed, keeping its blank vigil for seventy-five years.

The body was George Mallory.

On the morning of 6 June 1924 Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, made a breakfast of sardines, took their oxygen cylinders and began to climb Everest one last time.

It was Mallory’s third expedition. Always the men were beaten back. No matter how high they climbed, Everest was higher.

By now, the rest of their party were unfit, frostbitten, snow-blind and altitude sick. Irvine’s skin was peeling off his face due to freezing air temperatures contrasted with 120°F in the sun. The camp was ready to break up. Mallory argued for a final attempt. His colleagues thought he was in poor condition and mentally unstable.

After two days and nights climbing the mountain, Mallory, Irvine and the team of sherpas had
moved up from the North Col to Camp VI. It had been Mallory’s brainwave, as he called it, to set up a series of camps on the ascent route. Camp VI was just a two-man tent perched on a ridge. The climbers arrived. The sherpas set off back to the North Col. Tomorrow was everything. Tomorrow was nothing. Curled up, breathing oxygen, the men slept.

Day came. Mallory climbed. He had never climbed so well. His fingers and feet made a way across the ridges and rotten limestone so that he seemed to be an evolving part of the mountain itself. The mountain is endlessly moving, shifting, changing itself. Mallory was moving with it, using its undetectable flow as a rhythm for his own body. He sang the mountain, and the mountain, sharp, high, outside of human range, heard and sang back.

Irvine followed. Young, inexperienced, faithful, he would have followed Mallory anywhere. His fingers and toes went trustingly into the openings that Mallory noted. Every note took them higher up the octave of the mountain. They scaled impossible
flats, vertical sharps. Mallory’s body was natural to the mountain.

The two men were last sighted at 12.50 p.m. on 8 June 1924.

One of the team, Odell, had climbed behind them, up to Camp VI, and as he scanned the summit for a sign, he suddenly saw first one dark shape, then a second, moving rapidly towards the final peak. Then the clouds hid them from view.

It began to snow. Mallory hardly noticed. He was light, clean, with a crystal music in his head of the kind he had heard the Tibetan monks play in the monastery at Rongbuk. There was nothing to fear. There was only the forward movement of the ascent, and his heart beating time.

Why could he hear his heart? The thought came and went.

He was thirsty. They had lost their stove and hadn’t been able to thaw any ice. The oxygen had run out. He was very cold, but his fingers and toes went without fault into the bands of the rock. Irvine was
struggling now, but there was nothing to worry about. Mallory would pull him up on a rope. He would pull him up now because they were there.

The top of Everest, which is the top of the world, is about the size of a billiard table. Mallory had played the game and won. Only it didn’t feel like a game, it felt like music. The mountain was one vast living vibration. Again he heard the piercing sounds in his head, and underneath them his pulse.

He pulled Irvine towards him on the thin rope. He banged his watch and the glass broke. He started to laugh and then he couldn’t stop laughing, because it was so silly really, his watch going tick, tick, tick, when time had stopped long since and there was no time. Not here. They were outside time, he knew that.

They were quiet, the two men, and the mountain was quiet too. She wasn’t used to visitors. Not here.

Irvine was shaking uncontrollably, though Mallory was still. As seeming-still as the mountain he was becoming.

They began their descent.

Irvine’s body has never been found, though some claim it has been sighted.

Mallory was lying face down, his back and shoulders naked and white and changed into a part of the mountain. He was identified from the label in his clothes—

W.F. Paine. High St. Godalming. G. Mallory.

He had climbed Everest in his old tweed jacket.

In his inside pocket, frozen against his heart, was his last letter from his wife.

Unfold it. Read it. She loves him. She wants him to come home. His children miss him. The garden is lovely.

Her eyes are dark. His are pale.

Mallory fell. We don’t know how. He was found in the self-arrest position with a broken body and closed eyes. His broken watch was in his pocket. There was no more time.

In this life you have to be your own hero.

By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.

Like it or not, you are alone in the forest, just like all those fairy tales that begin with a hero who’s usually stupid but somehow brave, or who might be clever, but weak as straw, and away he goes (don’t worry about the gender), cheered on by nobody, via the castles and the bears, and the old witch and the enchanted stream, and by and by (we hope) he’ll find the treasure.

On the day I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.

I was not born to wealth. I was born to mind the machine. My parents and grandparents were weavers. They worked in the shuttering sheds that broke the line of the valley with their tall chimneys. They worked twelve-hour days and went deaf in their forties. They bred their own kind, as sheep and pigs do, but humankind is not sheep and pigs. They bred me, unexpected, unwanted. They bred me, and whether it was desperation, or a sixth
sense for trouble, they gave me away. They didn’t give away any of the others, before or after, but me they did, and quickly too.

They gave me away to my fate without even a card in the Post Office window saying ‘Good Home Wanted’. Good home, bad home, no home, it was all the same to them, and they left no bundle beside me for the journey.