Light

31 I’ve Been Here

After he ran out of the cottage, Michael Kearney was thrown back for a last time into his own memory, where he saw himself, twenty years old, returning from his last innocent train journey to find a short, badly dressed woman walking up and down the taxi rank outside Charing Cross station, where the action of the Tarot cards had stranded him. She was holding up a letter in her right hand and shouting:

“You bloody piece of paper, you bloody piece of paper!”

Greying hair straggled down around a broad face reddened with effort. A maroon woollen coat, thick as carpet, compressed her fat breasts. “You bloody piece of paper!” she cried. As if trying for some final, indisputable delivery, she varied the emphasis on this accusation until it had illuminated briefly every word. She had a duty of expression, you felt, to the forces inside her. It was work for her, work of the hardest sort, hawked up from somewhere deep. Kearney couldn’t repress a shudder. But no one else seemed bothered: instead, they regarded her with a cautious, even affectionate, amusement, especially when her back was to them. When Kearney’s turn came at the head of the queue, she stopped in front of him and caught his eye. She was short, stout. The smell that clung to her reminded him of empty houses, old clothes, mice. Her sense of drama, the intractable rawness of her emotion, left him unnerved.

“Piece of paper!” she shouted at him. He saw that the letter was old, shiny with use, falling apart at the folds. “You bloody piece!” She held it out to him. Kearney stared mutely away, aching with embarrassment. He tapped his foot.

“You bloody written thing!” she said.

He shook his head. He thought perhaps she wanted money. “No,” he said, “I—”

A taxi roared into the Charing Cross forecourt and pulled up next to him with a squeal of brakes. Dazzled briefly by the sunlight dancing in the raindrops on its bonnet, he seemed to lose sight of her. In a trice, she had reached in close and tucked the paper deftly into one of his jacket pockets. When he looked up, she was gone. On the paper he found not a letter but an address in Cambridge, written in blue ink as old as himself. He brought it close to his face. Reading it seemed to exhaust him. When the folds gave way, and it fell into lace in his hands, he redirected the taxi, caught another train and went home. There, depressed, worn out, unable to convince himself of the need to unpack his bag, he realised that he had memorised the address without wanting to. He tried to work. He sat dealing cards until it got dark, then—perhaps in a bid to remind himself of the triviality of all this—prowled from bar to bar, drinking restlessly, hoping to meet Inge Neumann and have her tell him with a laugh:

“It’s just a bit of fun.”

Next afternoon he stood in the rain where the paper had led him, across the street from a substantial old suburban house, detached, three or four storeys high, in gardens half-hidden behind a wall of attractively spalled red brick.

He had no idea why he had come.

He stood there until his clothes were soaked, but made no move to leave. Children ran up and down the street. At half past four there was a brief increase in traffic. As the rain cleared and the afternoon light shifted west, the brickwork took on a warm orange colour, and the garden wall seemed to recede a little, as if the street had widened; at the same time it seemed to stretch, becoming taller and longer. A little later, the woman in the wool coat waddled into view, breathing heavily and wiping her face. She crossed the road and, walking straight through the wall, disappeared.

“Wait!” gasped Kearney, and flung himself after her.

He had the sense of penetrating something membranous which clung elastically to his face. Then he heard a voice say: “It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,” and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them.

Odd items of furniture remained in the house, as if some tenant hadn’t quite abandoned it. It was cold in there. Kearney went from room to room, stopping to examine an old-fashioned brass fender, a wooden ironing board folded up like an insect in a corner. He thought he heard people whispering in the rooms above; a laugh cut off by a sudden intake of breath.

The Shrander was waiting for him in the master bedroom. He could see her clearly through the open door, standing at the bay window. Light poured round her thickened, monolithic silhouette, transfiguring the bare floor of the room, then spilled out onto the landing at Kearney’s feet, illuminating the rolls of dust beneath the cream-painted skirting board. Arranged on an inlaid table just inside the door he could see: books of matches; condoms in squares of foil; fans of Polaroid snapshots; a pair of oversized dice with symbols he didn’t recognise.

“You can come in,” the Shrander said. “You can step right in.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

At this a white bird flew past the three panes of the bay window, and the Shrander turned to face him.

Her head was no longer human. (Why had he ever thought it was? Why had anyone in the taxi queue thought it was?) It was the skull of a horse. Not a horse’s head, but a horse’s skull, an enormous curved bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip, and which looks nothing like a horse at all. A wicked, intelligent, purposeless thing which cannot speak. It was the colour of tobacco. There was no neck. A few shreds of coloured rag—perhaps they had once been ribbons, red, white and blue, studded with coins and medallions—hung where the neck might have been, forming a kind of mantle. This object tilted itself intelligently, looking up and sideways at Michael Kearney like a bird. Breath could be heard inside it. The body beneath, wrapped in its maroon woollen coat, stained and smelly with food, raised its pudgy arms in a proprietary yet generous gesture.

“Look,” ordered the Shrander, in her clear, childish, counter-tenor voice: “Look out here!”

When he did, everything lurched and there was nothing but blackness and a sense of enormous speed, a few dim points of light. After a moment, a chaotic attractor generated itself, churning and boiling in the cheap iridescent colours of 1980s computer art. Christ’s blood, Kearney thought, streaming in the firmament. He staggered, nauseated and vertiginous, and put out a hand to save himself: but he was already falling. Where was he? He had no idea.

“Real things are happening here,” the Shrander said. “Do you believe me?” In the absence of a reply she added:

“You could have all this.”

She shrugged, as if the offer was less attractive than she might have wished. “All of it, if you wanted. You people.” She thought for a moment. “The trick, of course, is to find your way around. I wonder,” she said, “if you know how close you are to that?”

Kearney stared wildly out of the window.

“What?” he said. He hadn’t heard a word.

The fractals churned. He ran out of the room. On the way, he stumbled into the little inlaid table and, grasping hold of it to keep his balance, found he had picked up the Shrander’s dice. At that, his own panic filled the room, a liquid so thick he was forced to turn and swim his way through the door. His arms worked in a sort of breaststroke while his legs ran beneath him in useless slow motion. He stumbled across the landing outside and straight down the stairs—full of terror and ecstasy, the dice in his hand—

They were in his hand again now as he struggled through the marram grass, high on the dunes of Monster Beach. If he looked back, he could see the cottage, a milky illumination coming and going at its windows. The sky was black, and full of bright stars; while the ocean, clasped in the arms of the bay, appeared silver, and fell upon the beach with a faint shushing noise. Kearney, who was not a natural athlete, made perhaps a mile before the Shrander caught him. This time it was much larger than him, though its voice still had the countertenor quality that made it sound like a boy or a nun.

“Didn’t you know me?” it whispered, looming above him so that the stars were obscured. It smelled of stale bread and wet wool. “I spoke to you often enough in your dreams. Now you can be the child you were.”

Kearney fell to his knees and pushed his face into the beach, where he perceived with clarity and suddenness not just the individual grains of wet sand but the shapes between them. They looked so distinct and detailed that he did, briefly, feel like a child again. He wept for the sheer loss of this: the loss of himself. I’ve had no life, he thought. And what did I give it up for? This. He had killed dozens of people. He had joined with a madman to do terrible things. He had never had children. He had never understood Anna. Groaning as much with self-pity as with the effort of not facing his nemesis, his face thrust firmly into the sand, his left arm held rigidly out behind him, he offered it the bag containing the stolen dice.

“Why me? Why me?”

The Shrander seemed puzzled.

“There was something I liked about you,” it explained, “from the very beginning.”

“You ruined my life,” Kearney whispered.

“You ruined your own life,” said the Shrander, almost proudly.

Then it said: “As a matter of interest, why did you murder all those women?”

“To keep you away from me.”

The Shrander seemed surprised at this.

“Oh dear. Didn’t you realise it wasn’t working?” Then it said: “It hasn’t been much of a life, has it? Why did you run so hard? All I wanted to do was show you something.”

“Take the dice,” Kearney begged, “and leave me alone.”

Instead, the Shrander touched his shoulder. He felt himself lifted and moved until he hung above the breaking surf. He felt his limbs straightened firmly but gently as if by some expert masseur. He felt himself turn in the air, hunting like a compass needle. “This way?” said the Shrander. “No. This way.” And: “You can forgive yourself now.” A curious sensation—freezing yet warm, like the first touch of an aerosol anaesthetic—propagated itself across his skin, then, penetrating him through every pore, raced about inside, unblocking every cul-de-sac he had driven himself into in his forty years, relaxing the sore, knotted lump of pain and frustration and disgust—as clenched and useless as a fist, as impossible to modify or evict—his conscious self had become, until he could see and hear and feel nothing but a soft velvety darkness. In this he seemed to drift, thinking of nothing. After some time a few dim points of light appeared. Soon there were more of them, and more after that. Sparks, he thought, remembering Anna’s sexual ecstasy. Sparks in everything! They brightened, congregated, pinwheeled up over him, then settled into the furious churning patterns of the strange attractor. Kearney felt himself fall into it, and come apart slowly, and begin to lose himself. He was nothing. He was everything. He flailed with his arms and legs, like a suicide passing the thirteenth floor.

“Hush,” the Shrander said. “No more fear.” It touched him and said, “You can open your eyes now.”

Kearney shivered.

“Open your eyes.”

Kearney opened his eyes. “Too bright,” he said. Everything was too bright to see. The light roared in on him unconfined: he felt it on his skin, he heard it as a sound. It was light unburdened, light like a substance: real light. Great walls and arcs and petals of it hung and flickered, they hardened, they endured a moment, they tumbled and fell towards him, they somehow passed through him and were gone in a second, only to be replaced. He had no idea where he was. He felt the most extraordinary sense of surprise and wonder and delight.

He laughed.

“Where am I?” he said. “Am I dead?”

The vacuum around him smelled of lemons. It looked like roses. He felt it tearing at him, inside and out. There was a horizon, but it seemed too curved, too close.

“Where is this? Are these stars? Is there anywhere really like this?”

Now the Shrander laughed too.

“Everywhere is like this,” it said. “Isn’t that something?” Kearney looked down and found it standing at his shoulder, a small fat thing the shape of a woman, perhaps five foot six in height, its maroon wool winter coat buttoned tightly, its great bone beak tilted up to face the roaring, toppling sky. He had the feeling it would have blinked, had there been any eyes in its sockets. “That’s the one thing we never seemed to get,” it said: “How unpackable everything is.” Coloured ribbons fluttered and streamed from its shoulders in a completely invisible wind; while the hem of its coat trailed in the dust of some ancient rocky surface.

“Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.”

The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway. Then, staring up at the collapsing, constantly replaced towers of light, he changed his mind and began to wonder what he could offer in return. Everything he thought of was inappropriate. Suddenly he remembered the dice. He still had them. He extracted them carefully from their leather bag and offered them to the Shrander.

“I don’t know why I took these,” he said.

“I wondered too.”

“Well anyway. Here they are.”

“They’re only dice,” the Shrander said. “People play some kind of game with them,” it added vaguely. “But look, I did have a use for them. Why don’t you just put them down?”

Kearney looked around. The surface they were standing on curved away, salted with dust, too bright to look at for long.

“On the ground?”

“Yes, why not? Just put them on the ground.”

“Here?”

“Oh, anywhere,” said the Shrander, making an offhand, liberal gesture. “Anywhere they can be seen.”

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” said Kearney. “Dreaming or dead.”

He placed the dice carefully on the dusty rock. After a moment, smiling at the fears of his vanished self, he arranged them so that the emblem he knew as “the High Dragon” faced upwards. Then he walked a little way away from them and stood on his own and turned up his face to the sky, where he imagined he could see among the clouds of stars and incandescent gas, the shapes of everything that had been in his life. He knew those things weren’t there: but it wasn’t wrong to imagine them. He saw pebbles on a beach. (He was three years old. “Run here!” his mother called. “Run here!” There was water in a bucket, cloudy with moving sand.) He saw a pool in winter, brown reeds emerging from the cat-ice at its margins. “Your cousins are coming!” (He saw them run laughing towards him across the lawn of an ordinary house.) He even saw Valentine Sprake, looking almost human, in a railway carriage. In all of that he never saw Gorselands once: but over it all he thought he saw Anna Kearney’s strong, determined face, guiding him to self-knowledge through the shoals of both their lives.

“You understand?” said the Shrander, which, having remained courteously silent through this process, now came to his side again and stared up in a companionable way. “There will always be more in the universe. There will always be more after that.”

Then it admitted: “I can’t keep you alive for much longer, you know. Not here.”

Kearney smiled.

“I guessed,” he said. “You mustn’t worry. Oh look! Look!”

He saw the raging glory of the light. He felt himself slipping away into it, here in this fabulous place. He was so amazed. He wanted the Shrander to know. He wanted it to be certain he had understood.

“I’ve been here and seen this,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”

He felt the vacuum empty him out.

Oh Anna, I’ve seen it.