The Weightless World (14 page)

In fact it took him almost another year, working from Reva’s schematics after hours in the lab, to reconstruct her circuit and build a prototype. At last, though, he grasped it – he understood what she’d done. While this work was not a secret, exactly, he didn’t discuss it with Reva, who seemed never to consider that there was anything especially to be done with her invention. She didn’t even use it much, and ascended in her chair only on days when getting round the flat was a particular chore. For her, the invention seemed to have been a point to prove, and now it was proven she had no further interest in it.

One Wednesday morning Tarik asked his colleagues in the lab if he could show them something. They smirkingly gathered round a heap of bricks, tied up in a rope and a wire, with a soldered black plastic box on top of it. With an effort of premeditated showmanship, not really successful, Tarik asked one of the researchers to hold the other end of the rope. The researcher took the rope, Tarik threw the switch on the plastic box, and the whole stack wavered up into the air. Fairly abruptly the researcher was flying a kite made out of bricks.

Tarik’s colleagues responded to the demonstration with various grades of disbelief, euphoria and acclaim. The one who had flown the brick kite clutched his face on either side and roared, ‘You did this? You
did
this?’

‘I did,’ Tarik said. ‘I did this, yes.’

The researchers then inspected his prototype for themselves. They became serious, sober, eyeing Tarik warily. The supervisor kept going out to make phone calls. One of the researchers, a man Tarik had known for years, at one point took a hard hold of his upper arm and seemed about to say something, then didn’t say anything.

Tarik started to freak out. He said he was suddenly feeling ill, overcome, and had to go home. The supervisor said he thought that was a bad idea, but Tarik packed up his prototype and left the lab. On his way out of the main entrance he was stopped by security. He opened his bag and spilled the prototype onto the floor. For good measure he trampled it a bit, pretending woozily to be attempting to pick it back up. The guard was so astonished by this performance Tarik was able to get away. He ran home and told Reva everything.

While he spoke her face barely moved. When he tried to explain why he had tried to steal her invention, to pass it off as his own, she seemed bored. When he tried to explain that the company would now very likely try to steal the invention off both of them, that the company would very likely do anything and everything in its power to make the invention its own, to get rid of them, to dispose of them, and they were now in terrible danger and had to leave, at once, she seemed merely annoyed, as if by a fly trapped in the curtains. He told her he would go to the bank, withdraw all the money they had, and they would leave the city. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, to weep and beg for forgiveness, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. As he slunk from her unmoving, unremarking sight, he vowed he would do it when he came back from the bank.

And when he came back from the bank Reva, and her chair, were gone.

‘So he came here.’ On the riverbank Ess circles a hand in the air – the river, the trees, the plain. ‘Tarik fled the city alone and here he has remained, watching the skyline for company agents, pining for his beloved and waiting to die.’

‘Fucking hell,’ I say.

‘Fucking hell indeed. That’s exactly what I said, though of course I said no such thing but rather “A-ha!” or “Now wait a minute!” When Tarik told me this story, I made him a promise. I vowed that I would purpose every iota of my shall we call it influence, dedicate every penny of my as it were capital, to recovering his Reva. To finding her and bringing her to him, to reuniting them, husband and wife, before expediting their swift transit out of India. This essentially was our agreement.’

‘Okay.’ I nod. I seem to be sliding about in the middle of some catastrophe.

‘And, I’m delighted to say,’ Ess says, ‘thanks to a certain tireless associate of mine, my promise is almost kept. Reva is found, and en route, and due to join us any day.’

‘She’s coming here?’

‘In the care of my indefatigable associate, yes. Reva is coming here.’

‘Your tireless, uh, your indefatigable…?’

‘To whom else would I entrust so solemn a task? Fancy Bill. You remember Fancy Bill, don’t you? Of course you do. Fancy Bill Fancy.’ Then Ess does an extraordinary thing. He purses his lips and releases a stunning salvo of highly decorative whistling. Suddenly, shockingly, the air by the river is full of the song of larks and nightingales. And then I remember, I know who he means: Bill – ‘Bill here’ – Bill Fancy, the wildlife photographer turned private investigator, the whistling detective whom Ess briefly contracted to keep tabs of a friendly sort on his ex-wife. The cheerful chubby cheeks, the cardsharp way he had of laying
out his photos – Eunice in a café, in her car, in a bathroom window.

‘Have no doubt, my boy, Fancy Bill has been busy in our behalf. I don’t pretend that his services have come cheaply, but then neither did he, to his undying credit, and his quest has unavoidably incurred expenses. But yes, he’s done it. Ticklish sort of a business, tax returns, paper trails, I shan’t bore, but the long and the short is he managed to track Tarik’s missus to a cousin of a cousin – possibly of a cousin – working as a housemaid in a hotel in Goa. Seems she’s been staying illicitly in this hotel, tucked away in a basement room or some such, in the care of this distant relative of hers. Fancy Bill reports that, uh, shall we say, Reva has attained a certain condition of physical fullness. Nonetheless, where there’s a will, where there’s a well-meaning penny, sometimes the mountain can indeed be induced to, to… no, I abjure that remark, don’t know what’s wrong with me. Overexcited, I apologise.’

He laughs, waves the hand again. ‘Still, you get the idea. Even now Reva, under the careful stewardship of my Fancy Bill Fancy, is making her way to this very spot. They’ll arrive any day. And then the lovers shall kiss, the papers change hands, the friends fondly part, and all shall be well.’ He laughs again. ‘I’m sorry I had to keep all this from you. But I understood you had your quite sensible doubts. So I edited somewhat, trusting the moment would come when I could open with you. Such as now.’

‘Okay.’ I nod. Reva has been staying in a basement room in a hotel in Goa. She’s got very fat. Bill Fancy is by some means bringing her to the plain. All right. This sounds all right. Then I say, ‘The company’s gone, Ess. Resolute’s gone.’

‘The company hasn’t gone. The company is precisely where it always was.’ He taps the side of his head. ‘Every name. Every address, every telephone number. Not quite every but a good few of the birthdays.’ He pulls his shirt on over his head, making
me aware for the first time in a while that he’s been topless, and rubs his hands together. In his scrubbed face the graph-paper scar sheds a strong, pink, latticed light. ‘I thought that might be something else we could do together. Once we’re back in Blighty and we’ve registered the patent and whatnot. We’ll take what’s in here’ – the head tap again – ‘and put it to use. Every name, every address. None of your email, your phone. We’ll go door to door. Everyone Resolute ever employed, every machinist, every cleaner, every manager, even the poor swine who got laid about by that Skycoach mess, every last one. A job if they want it. Sky-high pay and princely conditions in the world’s first company to manufacture and mass-market antigravity technologies.’ He stands, stands over me. He seems about to put his hand on top of my head. Then he puts his hand on top of my head. ‘What say you? When everything’s signed. We’ll go knocking on doors.’

‘Okay,’ I say. But I can’t shake off the sense of catastrophe.

He takes his hand from my head. ‘We can look forward to a busy few days. Lots of comings and goings. I daresay I could stomach a bite or two of breakfast.’

Ess is preparing to leave when I ask him something else. He frowns, thinks about it, then answers. And then I know what I need to know.

I sit on the riverbank. Ess has gone looking for breakfast. I should go too. But I can’t stand up, can’t free myself from invisibly clashing waves of disaster.

Well, he didn’t kill me. Only I almost –
almost
– wish he had.

I blink at the river for a bit, the trapped sludge, the wheeling foam. Then I sway to my feet and begin climbing the scoop of the bank towards the level above.

There’s a kid standing in front of me, a teenager in a brilliantly red T-shirt. I cry out in surprise. The kid grins. His immaculate teeth in their promontory of gum.

‘Laxman? Shit! Laxman! What are you doing here?’

‘Ha! What are
you
doing here?’

‘Laxman!’

‘What are you what are
you
doing here?’

Laughing, he turns, all the red billow of his T-shirt, and sprints away, past the trees, their skinny shadows, away into the light of the plain.

Ess is preparing to leave when I ask him, ‘Have you heard of a place called Cubbon Park?’

He frowns, thinks about it, then answers, ‘Cubbon Park. That’s Bangalore, isn’t it?’

And then I know what I need to know.

Back at camp Ess is sitting with Harry, having breakfast. As I near them both men wave to me. Drily I wave back. I can’t talk to Harry, and I can’t talk to Ess while he’s sitting with Harry. Also, I realise, this means I can’t join them for breakfast. This is bad news. I’m hungry, starving, and the air is thick with the crispy-bit sizzle of the Altman frying pan. I nod a dry nod and move on doggedly towards the Adventurers car.

Asha is still in there – bundled in her own arms in the front seat and glaring out the windscreen, full of a rage that makes her slam of the door go on resounding all round her. I knock lightly on the passenger window until she glances at me and then drops a hand onto the dashboard. With a wasp-like whine the window lowers a mean half-inch.

‘Yes? What?’ Two rapid stabs. In the mood she’s in she’ll use words, and anything else she can get hold of, as weapons. This is what gusts at me through the tiny gap in the window: her readiness, her eagerness to use weapons.

‘Two requests,’ I say. ‘Request one. Do you have any food?’

‘You want food?’ As if the thought disgusts her.

‘Yes, yes please.’

‘Your friends have food.’ She indicates Ess and Harry with the same gesture she would use to hurl a rock at them. ‘Ask your friends for food.’

‘Ah, well, that’s slightly tricky.’ I open up for her a smile crenellated with not-worth-asking-about awkwardness.

‘It isn’t tricky.’ She hurls another invisible rock. ‘Ask. I’ve no food for you.’

‘You must have the odd bit.’ I feel my smile hardening up, clamping together of its own accord. ‘In the boot, is it? Don’t trouble yourself, I’m sure I can manage.’

I swipe back from the window and start round the car towards the boot, her voice carrying after me: ‘Don’t you
touch
…’

We arrive at the boot at roughly the same time. I bounce the lid and it pops free. She tries to grab it but I push it up out of her way. The boot is lined with the white cake box-like lunchboxes and I claw one open, dig out a handful of sandwiches and bite into it – bite into two or three four-day-old chutney sandwiches all at once.

‘Oh!’ she cries. ‘This is excellent! Please, thieve on! Give me the excuse I’ve been dying for!’

‘What?’ I ask, through my mouthful of stale sandwiches. ‘I’m not thieving, Christ, if you’re so
bothered
…’ I reach into my pocket for the fold of notes Ess tried to pass to Laxman in the village yesterday.

‘You!’ Asha suddenly roars. She moves her hands in a manner that suggests she’s only just holding herself back from hitting me. ‘You people are vile!’

‘Okay.’ I hold up my free palm while I chew, try to slow the situation down. ‘Leave me out of it, okay?’

‘Leave you out of it!’

‘Just leave me right out of it. Whatever’s going on between you two…’

‘You people think you own everything, don’t you? You think everything is yours, you think everything is already yours.’

‘What the…’ I struggle to swallow, ‘what
the
fuck
is that supposed to mean?’

‘Even us. You think you own even us. Or you wouldn’t do what you do.’

‘I just think when a grown man and a…’

‘How can you live with what you do?’

‘What
the fuck
are you talking about? I haven’t fucking
done
anything…’

Then Asha’s restraint shatters, blows apart in near-visible fragments, and she takes hold of my throat and twists it in a way that makes me immediately and extremely compliant. She seems to want me to lie down on the ground, so I lie down on the ground. Her face looms above mine with a thoughtful expression.

‘You take a woman, and you haven’t done anything? You hold a woman in terror of her life, and you haven’t done anything? You do this for your business, for your profit, and you haven’t done anything? Then tell me please, when have you done a thing?’

The white lunchboxes seem to be tumbling about me in the dust. In my hand is still a wedge of chutney sandwiches with a large bite taken out of them.

‘I haven’t done that,’ I somehow say. ‘No one’s done that.’

‘I
know
,’ she whispers. ‘I know everything everyone has done. I know everyone’s business and I know it is
vile
.’

‘I don’t know what he’s told you…’

‘You know exactly what he’s told me. And I know what he’s told you. Oh, I can just imagine the conversations you had about the “treasures” he claimed on his travels round India, the rich plunder he took, the foolish girls, foolish women…’

‘He didn’t tell me—’ I try to say, but Asha isn’t interested.

‘Don’t talk to me like I’m a fool. I know what I am to him. He walks into my house one day and he talks and talks and he laughs and laughs and he reaches for me and I let him. Why shouldn’t I? He’s such a powerful man, and we all love a powerful man, don’t we? All us girls love a powerful man. I was his release, his outlet. Just like you, Steven.’

‘That’s…’ I start to say, but I don’t know what that is.

‘Wake up, little boy!’ She laughs, with rattling bitterness. ‘You really believe that? You’re just like him. You think he’s “a powerful man” to me? You don’t know anything about me. You see an Indian woman, and you think slums, you think wicked daddy, drinker husband, bruises all over her body. Well, think again. Do you know how many degrees I have? Three. Count them.’ But she does it for me, counting them out on stabbing fingers. ‘BA, MA, PhD. All my brothers do, and all my sisters do too. Yes, because our daddy is a rich daddy, and our mummy is a rich mummy. And we work, all of us, because we are not ashamed to work. Your Raymond Ess, what is he to me? He’s like you. He comes to me with his excitement, his bright eyes, his big smile… why, he’s a dear little boy.’

I stare up at her, say nothing.

‘You see?’ She laughs again, with the same bitter rattle. ‘I know that man, and I know he’s made a fool of me, but I know also the greater fool is Raymond Ess. Because now I
know
him. Better than you, his little suck-up lapdog friend, or whatever you are, know him. Better by far than he’ll ever know himself. Shall I tell you what he is? Let me enlighten you, little ass-kiss boy. He’s a lie. That man is a lie inside a lie inside a lie inside a lie.’ She releases me, sits up, pushes her hands through her hair. ‘You said “two requests”.’

‘Uh… Yeah.’ I feel concussed, annihilated.

‘What’s “request two”?’

‘Request two? Uh, uh, your camera.’

‘What about my camera?’ She takes a clip from her pocket and starts feeding her hair into it, roughly, as if disposing of a body.

‘I was going to ask you for it.’

‘Why were you going to do that?’

‘Yesterday. During the demo. You were taking lots of photos.’

‘So you were going to ask for my camera. Demand my camera. Take my camera from me, by force if necessary.’

‘That was the general idea.’

‘The poop-dog shit-nose kiss-ass and his general ideas.’ Her hair dealt with, she lifts suddenly onto her feet like something being erected on a stand and strides out of my field of vision. Before she strides back into it I hear her saying, ‘Do you know what makes me sick? You people think you own everything, you think everything is already yours. That’s very sad, but it isn’t what makes me sick. No, what makes me sick is: we just let you.’

Something smashes into the dust next to my head. I flinch, I whimper, I actually do that. Then I look and I see the something is Asha’s camera, its lens smashed, its exposed archaic film turning brown, turning black in the morning sun.

At last I sit up. Asha has gone, slammed herself back into the car. I turn and see, fifty or so feet away, Ess and Harry sitting in Harry’s camp, staring at me. Ess waves encouragingly. Tentatively I wave back.

Then I drop the handful of sandwiches I’m still somehow clutching, shake it off my fingers into the dust next to Asha’s camera, gather up as many of the white lunchboxes as I can carry and start walking at speed with them towards the test site.

As I pass Harry’s camp, head down, one or other of the sitting men seems to beckon to me. I don’t look up. I don’t reply.

The rest of the day I spend sitting on my block.

Water bottle, lunchbox; cigarettes, matches; tablet, phone. All this and a complete view of the surrounding area. What more could I need?

The more I could need, I soon realise, is shade. The heat is torrential, the concrete on every side of me glaring, blinding. But I’ve forgotten my hat, left it in the storage shed, so I take off my T-shirt and hang it over my head and shoulders. Nonetheless I feel my lower back and forearms and kneecaps starting to burn.

After this the miseries heap up. I watch Ess break off his conversation with Harry, take some papers from his satchel – unidentifiable at this distance, but no doubt a fistful of waivers, releases, prepared for Mr Tarik Kundra’s signature – and brandish them over to the cabin, into which he disappears for so long I begin to realise that something else I could need up here is a toilet. Eventually I stand, my T-shirt swaying round my head, cross to the opposite end of the block and take a piss off it. I’m expecting a virile arc terminating with a patter in the distant dust, but in fact my piss just drops straight down the side of the block in a reeking black stream. By the time I get back to my lookout post I have no way of telling whether Ess is still in the cabin trying to talk Tarik into an early signing or he’s come out and disappeared into another segment of my, it turns out, far from complete view.

The stale taste of the sandwiches, packed round my teeth, becomes impossible to ignore. I raise my water bottle, swig, find it empty. I check my cigarettes. One left.

I open my tablet and scroll through my emails. Nothing new. I’m not really hoping for anything, from Martin Cantor or anyone else. Why would I? I’m on my own out here.

I select the message from Michael (‘hey steve!’) and delete it, pointlessly but also euphorically. Then I find the message from Daniel Darling (‘
Steven, I am writing to you because Al tells me you have bought me a gift
’), hit the ‘Reply’ option and begin, slowly, painfully, with stinging elbows and kneecaps, as if etching into the same concrete I’m sitting on:

‘Steven? Hey Steven!’

Pain in my throat where Asha’s fingers went in. Pain in my head where Ess’s story – Tarik, Reva, the machine, ‘Now I’m beautiful’ – went in. What else?

I claw the shirt from my face and sit up. I’m stranded on an iceberg of concrete in a numb blue sky. The voice is coming from under the edge somewhere and I already know it’s Harry’s. I slither over the concrete like a snake and look down at him anyway.

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to come down from there. Sure, you needed some space… but time for you to come down. Let’s go, kid. Let’s get you down from there.’

‘
Fuck
off,’ I say.

He blinks up at this somewhat grimly. Then he asks, ‘Have you got cigarettes?’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

‘I don’t think you’ve got many.’ He jerks his head back. ‘You come on down from there, I’ll buy you a pack of cigarettes.’

‘Where from? The village? It’s a… fucking
yonk
away.’

‘Not the village. I’ll show you where. You come on down.’

In fact I don’t have any cigarettes: I smoked my last one while chipping out my email to Daniel. Probably I don’t need any more, hadn’t planned to get any more, but now Harry is going on about it the idea is there, the taste, the snagging-hook sensation in the roof of my mouth, so I think fuck it and pull my T-shirt back on and slide down the side of the block.

Evening on the plain. Harry Altman in his wheezy combats.

‘How are you doing?’ he asks as we start away. ‘Still dying of malaria?’

I move my fingers to the point of my elbow but find no trace of its node, its lobe, its poisonous flesh-tag. The skin is completely smooth. Bemused, I mutter, ‘Don’t think so.’

‘Just beat up, then? That looked like some scrap you kids got in to.’

‘I’m okay.’ I raise my head and my spine unslots like the sections of a telescope. ‘I mean, it was totally uncalled for. But I’m okay.’

‘Tempers are fraying,’ Harry says, as if this is deep truth indeed, which obviously it’s not. ‘People are not themselves.’ He sighs. ‘I’m sure Asha didn’t mean you any harm.’

‘That’s what you think.’

‘You don’t think people are getting raggedy?’

‘I think she’s a lunatic, is what I think. I think you’ve employed a fucking
psycho
.’

Working his face a bit, Harry searches his repertoire of chuckles then comes out with his wise-old-geezer chuckle – his seen-it-all, done-it-all, nothing-new-under-the-sun chuckle. ‘Where I used to work we had a name for situations like this. Like when a team was getting close to deadline, a project not working out, everyone going nuts and turning on each other, sharpening sticks, daubing their faces with mud… We called it “the volt room”. We’d say, “Don’t even talk to those guys. They’re in the volt room. Those guys, they’re all locked up in the volt room.” That’s where we are now, kid. All locked up together in the volt room.’

The edges of the evening sky remind me of a gas flame. We pass some dry, splintery trees like the collapsed remains of a firebombed building – of a
shop
.

But really it’s a dream. The sky and the air and the great level of the plain. I breathe deeply, draw it up, take in the dream as far as I can take it into my body.

Harry says, ‘I was listening to you gentlemen yesterday: “No more buses. No more trains”. And yeah, I guess that’s what we’re looking at. But did you also think how what we’re looking at is no more bus conductors? No more train drivers? No more ticket inspectors? And of course so on and so on and so forth and so forth?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, faintly smiling, looking at the sky and the air and the plain, ‘I did think about that, and I decided I don’t
give
a shit.’

We come to a tiny wooden shack surrounded by packing cases and metal buckets and glass jars and other bits of debris. Harry seems to think we’re going to go into this shack. I’m not going into this shack. If I go into this shack I’m going to die in it. Nothing more certain.