The Weightless World (10 page)

‘It just seems to have got to him. They’re reporting it like mad over here. I imagine it’s even worse where you are…’

‘It’s pretty bad.’ I have no idea what it is. It’s not just that I’ve not sought coverage of the Bangalore bombing – I’ve avoided it, sidestepped it, shut my ears to it.

‘What freaked me out was that thing about shoes… Did you see that? About rescue workers finding people’s shoes in the street. And finding people’s feet in the shoes…’

‘Disturbing.’ Up and down, my head on its hinge.

‘You just think: Why? Why would anyone do that? What could possibly justify doing such a thing?’

‘People are mental.’

‘No they’re not. Well, yes they are. But at the same time no they’re not. You know what I mean? That’s the worst part of it. No. They’re
not
.’

‘I know exactly what you mean.’

‘Do you?’

‘I do.’ I don’t know what she means.

‘Are you all right out there, Jug-head?’

‘What? I’m fine.’ The acid of ridiculous disappointment burns in my guts, and I’m terrified that I’m going to lose her. That when I come back from my business trip not richer than Warren Buffet, not richer than Bill Gates, she’s going to leave me. That she’s going to recoil in disgust from my poverty, my joblessness, my powerlessness, and leave me. ‘What are you talking about? I’m great out here.’ I attempt a smile. ‘Time of my life.’

Then she says I love you and I say I love you too.

I go to the door, look towards Harry’s camp and see no one there but Harry, sitting upright with a fixed expression: watching TV inside his specs. Then I scan further and I see Asha silently rolling inside the Adventurers car, making herself comfortable for the night, and then Ess, standing by one of the other sheds, his phone clamped to his face. I’m turning away when he makes a gesture, a slicing motion of the blade of his hand, and I pause, continue watching him. For a long time I try to hear what he’s saying, but at this distance it’s difficult, and I’m reluctant to go any closer, to let him see that I’m listening. Finally, for a moment, his voice rises, shrilly he utters the words, ‘No, no. Fancy! Well, quite! Fancy! Well, yes, that’s right…’ then his voice drops again and he goes on speaking, quick, irate, busily snipping. His head and limbs seem dangerously impacted into his body. I wait for him to make another dramatic gesture, to raise his voice, to mime or shout some reference to the person he’s talking to, but if anything he seems to grow calmer as I watch, a familiar Ess tactic, shrinking the argument he’s having until the person he’s arguing with (whoever, in this case, that may be) forgets they were ever arguing with him. I watch a little longer, then turn back into the shed.

I remember Daniel’s email, and settling back down on my sleeping bag, I open it:

I should reply straight away: not even think about it, scrawl down the first thing that comes into my head and zap it back to him before I have chance to lose momentum. I open a ‘reply’ pane and stare at the cursor – that blinking, living paper-cut. Doesn’t need to be special. Anything. The first thing that comes into my head.

Then it’s not night any more but a moment of enormous orange stillness either just before sunset or just after sunrise and there’s no one in view for hundreds of miles and I know this because I’m suspended in the air above the plain, not drifting or floating but sort of
hanging
, looking down at the cracked vast plain, the cabin, the sheds, the six huge inert blocks in their circle, looking about at the orange emptiness of the air, frozen cloud shapes, distant specks that whirl and twirl and slowly grow larger, become people, Tarik cleaning his specs, Asha taking a photo, Harry running and leaping with his wobbly belly, Ess arguing angrily on his phone, Alice settling in front of her laptop, they
and others, a hundred, a thousand, a million, all the population of the planet whirling and twirling round me, swooping at my face then spiralling upwards, and then without any sensation of falling or having fallen I’m down on the ground, walking over the plain, the whole population of the planet waltzing in the air above my head while I go along, picking up the shoes I find discarded everywhere on the dry-dead earth, hundreds, thousands, millions, picking up humanity’s shoes and putting them away for safekeeping in my shoulder bag.

I wake into fiery darkness. I’m flapping round on top of my sleeping bag. Something long and thin and silky skitters away from my arm and I roll onto my back and grab at my elbow. Everything is sticking to me. I’m wet, drenched, drowned in my own sweat.

As I struggle to sit up, I realise my arm is suffused with a steady, ravenous stinging; on the back of my elbow a hot node beats with its own pulse. I twist my arm, try to turn it so I can see the back of my elbow, but the turn can’t be made without further pain and anyway it’s so dark in here I can’t see a thing.

‘Ess?’ I call piteously into the darkness. ‘I think something bad’s happened. I think something really bad’s happened to me.’ But he doesn’t reply, doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t give any sign that he’s in the shed with me at all.

For a minute I try groping round for my tablet, for my phone, anything with a screen that can be lit up and used against the darkness, then panic gets the better of me and I climb upwards against the wall, rock to my feet and blunder about with my hands outstretched until I find the door, push it open and dive out into the lesser darkness of the plain.

What was I thinking? It’s the middle of the night. The darkness outside is lesser, but it’s still darkness; and my arm is no easier,
no less painful, to turn. I can’t see the back of my elbow and the node there bulks against my fingertips like a tumour, an alien growth.

A mosquito has bitten me. I have malaria. I have no future now but delirium then death.

The air is full of grief, full of an inconsolable keening. I assume it’s me, my keening, then I realise it’s not: the sound is coming from elsewhere. For a long time I don’t care about the sound; then I stop trying to turn my arm, allow it to fall naturally against my side, though I keep my other hand pressed hard over the point of the elbow, as if trying to push the node back in, to force it to break up on the bone, and I look about for the source of the sound.

Now the lesser darkness is lesser still; against the grey sky the cabin and the sheds appear in phantasmal outline. I scuttle towards the cabin, but the sound grows no louder; I scuttle towards one of the other sheds, and the sound grows softly quieter. Then I scuttle towards the final shed and the sound becomes loud, rich with detail. In the same instant that I realise it’s Ess making the sound, Ess crying, Ess keening, I plunge myself against the front of the shed, find the door handle, turn it, and fling the door open.

Inside the shed there’s a small, yellow light; I can’t see where it’s coming from but it makes me think of candles, vases, a leaking wick under glassy sheen. Ess is lying on the floor in the yellow light. His face is tipped so that I can see only one ridged side of it.

‘Get
out
,’ he hisses. ‘Get
out
of here.’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘sorry, fuck…’

I fling the door shut and reel backwards into the darkness. Nonetheless all I can see is the yellow light, the side of Ess’s face, and Asha lying under him, her eyes alertly amused, softly chiding, and seeming to ask,
How does the world look to you now?

‘It’s nothing,’ says Harry. ‘A fleabite, maybe. A
splinter
…’

‘Are you sure?’ I push my elbow closer to his face, almost hitting the end of his nose. ‘Have a good look.’

‘You’ve turned over in your sleep, hooked a splinter out of the wall…’ He goes back to prodding our breakfast round the pan – two sausages, two eggs, two rashers of bacon. ‘Sure, you’ll want to keep on top of your antimalarials…’

‘I had a double dose this morning. Two pills.’

‘I don’t recommend that. No sir. Keep on top of your regimen, because that’s what you’d do anyway, but you’ve nothing to worry about there.’

He gives me a reassuring smile then returns his attention to the pan. And yes, I’m reassured, I’m grateful. But still for a moment I go on looking at him, wondering:
Who are you, Harry? What are you up to?

‘I just wish I could
see
it…’ I’m about to start my whole futile arm-turning thing again when the shed furthest away from us clunks open and Ess steps out of it. In a state of fixed-smile dishevelment, pretending not to have seen us, he crosses to the latrine and carefully shuts its rickety door after him.

Harry hands me my plate. I take it and begin greedily eating without moving my eyes away from the shed Ess has just left.

‘Didn’t you gentlemen…’ But I shake my head until Harry shuts up and joins me in staring at the shed.

We’ve both finished eating by the time the shed clunks again and Asha comes out. She walks straight up to us, drops herself
down on the ground next to Harry’s cooker and taking out a nail file asks if there’s any more breakfast stuff because she doesn’t know why but she’s
starving
. She says this looking right at me, as if we share a delicious secret, which to my mind we don’t.

‘No problem,’ Harry says, and goes on in a way that suggests the significance of Ess and Asha stepping out of the same shed passed him by completely, ‘important we keep our strength up. Place like this, it’ll wear you right down.’

‘That’s absolutely right.’ Asha spins the twinkly file.

‘And it’s an important day, right? Take two of the big demonstration.’ Harry chortles over his pan: his space-shuttle eggs, his zero-gravity sausages. ‘That is, assuming Tarik’s got his shit together. Man, at this rate those Swiss are going to leave his ass for dust.’ He glances at us, expecting to be asked for clarification, but Asha is more interested in her nails and I’m having trouble looking up from my plate. He clarifies anyway, ‘Those Swiss guys, they’re making strides. I don’t know that they’re even so far behind Tarik with this one now. We’re talking, like, any day…’

Then the latrine door clicks again and my head snaps up and I don’t hear much else of what Harry is saying because I’m watching Ess, still with his fixed smile, still jolting along with his alone-in-the-world automaton carriage, walk to the cabin, knock, wait, then stand in uneasy conference with Tarik, who leans out the door at him in the manner of a suburbanite disturbed by police in the night for no proper reason. Then Tarik disappears and Ess comes veering towards us, holding his hands out and rubbing them together as if he’s just washed them with a powerful disinfectant.

‘Morning, morning,’ he calls, already skirting Harry’s camp, ‘I believe we’re looking at lunchtime for the demo, so, don’t tell Tarik, but I thought I’d pop over to the village. Stretch the old legs. See you later, and for god’s sake don’t tell Tarik.’

‘I’ll come.’ I stand quickly, knocking my empty plate, flipping it over in the dust. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘As you please.’ He clearly minds very much, but there’s nothing he can do about that now. I’m walking along next to him, and Harry and Asha are watching us. ‘I only wonder,’ he murmurs after a few more paces, ‘if you’re quite up to it.’

‘Why wouldn’t I be up to it?’

‘Well it’s quite a way, isn’t it? How far did we say? Five miles, six? Might be a bit rough on the old back.’ He nods confidentially.

‘We said it was two miles. I’ll be fine.’

‘Will you.’

‘It’s been okay. “The old back”. I think it might actually be getting better.’

‘Do you?’

‘I think it might.’

‘Well.’ He smiles, laughs, apparently despite himself. The stiff eye crinkles soften and flex. ‘That
is
good news.’

Isn’t it?

One Friday night four years ago I got myself knocked down by a car. There was damage to my back, a nebulous wedging or rippling of the flesh round my spine, a ‘joggling about’ that left no material injury but deeply baffled the pain receptors in my lumbar region, promising years of lost signals, ghostly sensations, the busy click of immaterial needles. A fairly mild course of physio was suggested and once a week for six weeks a cheerful guy called Dolan rearranged my limbs on a crash mat. I took some heavy-duty painkillers, then some less heavy-duty ones, then none at all on a regular basis. Occasionally I would feel something weird – gripping, contracting, clicking – but a couple of days of gulping over-the-counter aspirin soon smoothed everything out. And that was pretty much it.

Except, that is, for the matter of how I’d got myself knocked down in the first place.

I was still in the hospital when Ess started talking about it. He had several reasons to do this. One was his concern for my wellbeing. Another was his concern for the company. Both of these concerns related to the fact that the hospital’s careful overnight examination of me had discovered, among other things, that my system was pumped full of narcotics. That, at the time of the accident, I’d been illegally intoxicated. I’d been smashed out of my head.

‘We’re not going to worry about this,’ Ess said, leaning forward at my bedside (this was my second or third day in). ‘I mean the legal dimension or what-have-you. This is not a dimension I individually or Resolute Aviation as a whole takes an interest in. And if we’re not interested in it, we won’t hear it said. And so it isn’t said. It goes away.’ He made a swiping gesture – a magician vanishing a small object. ‘It’s gone, it never existed.’ His smile narrowed, came to rest on me with delicate purpose. ‘Which, I’m happy to say, leaves only my other concern. Which is you. Which is you, Mr Strauss.’

At the time I didn’t fully register what he was saying: that he, or the company, or at any rate someone, was going to suppress the hospital’s report on me – to detain it, isolate it, bury it. Were such things possible? Did people like Ess, companies like Resolute, have the means to achieve them? It seemed fabulous, impossible. But this occurred to me only later. At the time I couldn’t think about anything but the series of questions contained in Ess’s narrow smile.

The answer to more or less all his questions was that I was smoking a lot of weed, among other things. You wouldn’t have thought it then, and you certainly wouldn’t think it now, but for about three years I was a full-on caner. Every day during that period – from within a couple of months of my move to Yeovil
until the Friday night I got myself knocked down by a car – I was at least a little bit mashed, and on many days I was very mashed indeed. I presented no drug culture for the reason I didn’t have any: when I indulged I indulged alone, in the aerated isolation of the (pre-Alice) Hawks Rise flat.

Why? That’s what Ess wanted to know too, and while I ended up saying a great deal to him on the subject I’m not sure I ever really gave him an answer, because I’m not sure I ever really had one. Why, during that period, did I get quite so fucked up? I don’t know. But I knew I couldn’t say that to Ess, not when he was taking such trouble over me, not when he looked at me with that narrow, delicate smile, and without exactly lying I tried to come up with stuff that would suffice, frowned and struggled to fit words like ‘stress’ and ‘crisis’ and ‘depression’ into sentences that made sense.

Entirely confidentially, he arranged some counseling sessions for me. Twice a month for almost a year I met a sweet-natured middle-aged lady called Janice in a small homely room at the top of a gappy flight of stairs at the Yeovil Drug and Alcohol Centre. Most of our sessions took place on work nights, and usually I arrived at the centre and strolled past the druggies and junkies, raggedly writhing in their plastic chairs, still in my work clothes, and sat down in the high bare room still crackling with my work energy, my office snap and whiplash. I don’t know how to say it: Janice was impressed with me. I think I wasn’t in the least what she was used to. She asked how I was and when I gave her some breezy anecdote about my working day she laughed automatically, nervously, shrilly. Quite a heavy lady, Janice was: lots of lumps of Janice to love.

She shouldn’t have thought so well of me. Ess drove me to those sessions and sat in the car with his newspaper and when I came out he drove me home. He never asked how a session had gone. He never seemed annoyed when a session overran
(as they did increasingly, until we agreed to discontinue them altogether). And he never missed one. Two a month for almost a year. Not one.

It was Janice who suggested that I’d not had a problem with drugs so much as a problem with loneliness and despair, which seemed to me to be letting me off altogether too lightly, though this was more or less the same interpretation Alice took when we got round to talking about that part of my life. ‘Is that right?’ she asked, protectively circling one of my arms with both of hers. ‘Do you think you were very lonely back then?’

‘I suppose I was.’

‘But you’re not any more, are you, no? You’re not lonely now, are you, no?’

‘I’m not lonely any more.’

This answer seemed to satisfy her, because her next question was simply, ‘Where did you get it from? The stuff?’

‘There used to be a bloke in one of the other flats. He was actually called Randy. He sold the strongest skunk I’d ever come across. He called it “mind control”. He was very helpful.’ He was a drug dealer, was what he was.

‘Mmn. It sounds like
Ess
was helpful. Do you think he felt guilty?’

‘Why would he feel guilty?’

‘Well there you’d been, right under his nose, off your gourd every day for what was it, a year? Longer? He must’ve felt bad about that.’

‘I suppose so.’ But I didn’t. I didn’t suppose that was why Ess had helped me.

Her final question was, ‘What was it like? Being so stoned all the time?’

‘It wasn’t like anything. It was like… no edges, no corners. Just… floating.’

‘Was it nice?’

‘Some of the time it was nice.’

‘And you just gave it up?’

‘After I got knocked down by a car and shopped by my boss and ferried to and from counseling for a year, yeah, I just gave it up.’

‘Just like that.’

‘Just like that.’

Ess and I have been walking for at least an hour, barely speaking, only occasionally commenting on our surroundings, when we come in sight of the village, a thatched horizon with black trails of smoke coming out of it. The dust thickens, darkens, and starts to show the patterning of human industry – rows, furrows, raddled meshes. As we approach the road an incurious shepherd passes with his herd. We pause to watch the last of the cattle go by, their hind parts like unslung saddles rocking and sliding inside bloody sacks.

At the edge of the village we pause again to inspect a tall, skinny sort of pylon with a meteorological look to it. While we’re standing there I decide that enough’s enough and I start to say, ‘Uh, last night…’

‘Oh, no.’ Ess smiles mildly up at the pylon. ‘No. I don’t think so, do you?’

We enter the village, briefly sharing the lane with a group of turbaned men trooping out to the fields with their hands full of slender, wand-like tools – antennaed rods, eyeleted sticks: hoes? rakes? – men who observe us with as little curiosity as the farmer we passed on the road. Then the lane empties and we go on between rather squat, solid circular huts each with a springy blonde thatch and frenetically textured walls, the painterly plastering on every side carrying rigid whirlpools of mud and hay and a taut clean tang of shit.

We pass workshops, something like a blacksmith’s, something like an ironmonger’s, a brackish roaring concrete building with kilns at the back of it. We pass huge steel-and-glass pods full of water. We pass a tamarind tree with an easel propped against it, except the easel isn’t an easel but a flat metal box gripped in a tripod with cables snaking into it from every part of the village. We pass a stone well surrounded by ornately carved wooden pillars and brilliant chalk patterns etched in the dust: supernovae, chemical formulae…

At last we enter a courtyard with the bristling atmosphere of a marketplace, though it’s not a marketplace. Veiled women stalk past us with a faintly indignant air. I expect Ess to try charming them, waving, calling out, but he doesn’t do any of this. He walks along with a concentrated expression, lips pursed, eyes not narrowed but unnaturally still.

The courtyard is full of people eating, drinking, talking, sitting, standing. Absurdly I think for a moment that the place must be a sort of open-air café. Then I notice a strange absence, which is the absence of currency. No money is changing hands. No one is buying anything. No one is selling anything. For some reason I think of the roaring kilns. Then I notice a strange absence, which is the absence of Ess. Suddenly he’s nowhere near me, he’s gone. I look round and there’s only the bristling life of the villagers with their tea and their bread, their voices, their laughter. My hand drifts to my elbow, its sore malarial node.

Then I see him. He’s strolling towards me, talking earnestly with a kid of sixteen or so in a bright red T-shirt. I shoot my arms in a what-the-fuck gesture. Ess laughs.

‘Laxman, allow me to introduce my impatient young associate.’

The kid grins at me, startlingly. His lips twang and reduce to a stealthy insect pulsing at either side of his mouth. His teeth are immaculate, but they glare out in a pale block of naked gum. All I can see when I look at him are grooves, notches, bulges of gum.

Laxman leads us to a corner of the courtyard, urges us to sit, then brings us dinged tin plates of roti, clenchy clay mugs of chai. Ess is halfway through a speech about the rustic charm of it all when Laxman, innocently, unpointedly, takes a phone from his pocket and slits its screen with his fingertip. I start to laugh and kick Ess’s leg. I roll onto my back and I see them everywhere in the courtyard: turbaned men, veiled women, kids mounted on saffron laps, flicking, scrolling, pinching at touchscreens. Denizens of the Indian wilds, downloading movies and music, Skypeing friends in New York and Beijing.