Transition

2

It is amazing what you can tell even with your eyes quite tightly closed. I can tell, for example, what season it is, what sort of day it is, which nurses and orderlies are on duty, which other patients have visited my room, which day of the week it is, and whether someone has died.

None of this is difficult and certainly none of it is in any way supernatural. It simply requires that one keeps one’s ears open and one’s senses attuned to everyday reality. A good memory for previous experiences helps too, as does a decent imagination. The imagination is necessary not to make things up – that would be wrong – but to come up with plausible scenarios for what one’s senses are detecting; theories that might explain what is going on.

Sometimes I spend entire days with my eyes closed. I pretend to sleep – I do sleep, longer than I would otherwise – and I allow my other senses to paint the scene around me. I can hear wind and rain against the window and birdsong outside, I can tell from the faint draught and the definition and detail of the sounds outside that the window is ajar, even if I missed the creaking, scraping noise of it being opened, and from the scents that reach me from it and the feel of the air I know immediately whether it’s a summer’s day or an unusually warm interlude in either spring or autumn. I can smell the identifying body odours and perfumes of the nurses and doctors who attend me and so can tell who is there even without hearing their voices, though I know those too, of course.

Occasionally other patients wander in and I know they are there from their institutional, medicinal smell. I don’t mix with them sufficiently to have built up a reliable database of them all as individuals, though one or two do stand out through body odour or what they do; one man smells of a particular cologne, one old lady carries with her the scent of violets, another always runs her fingers through my hair (I can peek through not-quite-closed eyelids and so see who is responsible when something like this happens). One small, gaunt man whistles aimlessly more or less all the time and another chubbier fellow never visits without tapping absently on the metal frame at the foot of the bed with his fingernails.

The rhythms of the hospital day, week, month and year are also obvious without recourse to sight and the place, of course, feels and sounds quite different at night; most noticeably, far quieter. During the day, meals are regular, drug rounds too (there are two drug trollies – one has a squeaky wheel), doctors perform their various rounds according to a certain timetable and the cleaners have an entirely predictable set of rotas that cover every temporal scale from daily dusting and wiping to the annual spring clean.

So, very little escapes me as I lie here, even with the most informational of my senses deliberately denied.

I can see perfectly well, though. This is really just a game, something to help occupy my time while I wait out my self-imposed exile and bide my time before returning to the fray.

I will, most assuredly, be back.

Once, I watched her hand move above a lit candle, through the yellow flame, fingers spread fluttering amidst the incandescing gas, her unharmed flesh ruffling the very burning of it. The flame bent this way and that, guttered, sent curls of sooty smoke towards the dim ceiling of the room where we sat as she moved her hand slowly back and forth through the gauzy teardrop of fire.

She said, “No, I see consciousness as a matter of focus. It’s like a magnifying glass concentrating light rays on a point on a surface until it bursts into flame – the flame being consciousness. It is the focusing of reality that creates that self-awareness.” She looked up at me. “Do you see?”

I nodded, though I was not sure that I did see. We had taken certain drugs, and they were still affecting us. I knew enough to realise that one could talk utter nonsense in such circumstances and that it could seem unutterably profound at the time. I knew it but at the same time felt that this was quite different.

“There is no intelligence without context,” she continued, watching her hand go through the flame and back. “Just as a magnifying glass effectively casts a partial shadow around the point of its focus – the debt required to produce the concentration elsewhere – so meaning is sucked out of our surroundings, concentrated in ourselves, in our minds.”

One summer when I was a teenager some friends and I were walking into town, saving our bus fares to have more money to spend on sweets, burgers and slot machines. Our route took us down a quiet suburban street of houses with small front gardens. We came to one garden – mostly paved, with a few mismatched pots holding dry, bedraggled-looking plants – where a fat grey-haired man was lying asleep in a deckchair. We all stopped to look, sweating. A couple of the guys had taken their T-shirts off and were bare-chested, like the old man. He had lots of curly grey hair on his chest. Somebody whispered that he looked like a beached whale. The garden was tiny; he’d had to angle the deckchair across it to fit in. He was so close that you could smell the coconut oil on his skin, so close that we could almost touch him.

We stood there watching him sleep and somebody else said they wished we had a water pistol. The sun was behind us, light beating on our backs. I was the tallest and the shadow of my head was putting the man’s feet into shade. I remembered I had a magnifying glass with me. I’d been using it to burn holes in the leaves of my stepmother’s prize flowers.

“Watch this,” I said, and took the magnifying glass out. I held it so that it focused the sunlight on the skin of his chest, then moved it along and up through the forest of glinting grey hairs to concentrate the light on his little puckered left nipple. Some of the guys were starting to laugh already. I began to laugh too, which made the small, bright point of light waver, but I held it steady enough and long enough for him to shift a little, and for a frown to appear on his face. I still think I saw a faint wisp of smoke. Then his eyes flicked open and he bellowed, sitting up suddenly, his eyes wide, one hand flying up to his singed nipple. The other guys were already running, howling with laughter, down the street. I sprinted after them. We heard him shouting after us. We avoided that street for a few weeks.

I don’t mention this story to her, either at the time or ever.

“I’d have said,” (I said, instead,) “that we give, even… Even that we radiate, emanate meaning. We ascribe context to external things. Without us they exist, I suppose-”

“Do they?” she murmured.

“-but we give them names and we see the systems and processes that link them. We contextualise them within their setting. We make them more real by knowing what they mean and represent.”

“Hnn,” she said, shrugging fractionally, distracted by the sight of her hand moving through the flame. “Maybe.” It sounded like she was losing interest. “But everything requires a leavening. Everything.” She let her head fall slowly to one side, watching her hand moving through the flame with a perfectly absorbed intensity that left me free to look at her.

She sat bundled in a crumpled white sheet. Her hair, a brown-red spill of curls across her shoulders and along her slender neck, formed a quiet nimbus around her tipped head. Her deep brown eyes looked almost black, reflecting the flickering candlelight like some image of the consciousness that she had been speculating about. They looked perfectly still and steady. I could see the minuscule spark of the flame reflected in them, see it occluded by her hand passing over it. She blinked slowly, almost languorously.

I recalled that the eyes only see by moving; we can fasten our gaze on something and stare intently at it only because our eyes are consumed with dozens of tiny involuntary movements each second. Hold something perfectly and genuinely still in our field of vision and that very fixity makes it disappear.

“I love you,” I heard myself whisper.

She glanced up. “What?”

Her hand stopped, poised over the flame. She jerked it away. “Ow!”

In the main salon of the Café Atlantique – vast and echoing, with a ceiling lost in a layer of ancient-looking smoke stirred by giant wobbling ceiling fans – there is a Jupla band playing to the mostly indifferent crowd packing the spaces between the tables, which are variously set for eating, drinking and gaming. Stained-glass circular windows set high in the two gable walls struggle along with globular yellow lamps the size of bathyspheres to illuminate the chaotic scenes below, where small, sweating men wearing sandwich boards run up and down the aisles.

The pretty little Eurasian singer wears a vibrato collar and the snare drums are doubled, one set conventionally while the other is poised upside down directly above, separated by about half a metre. As Madame d’Ortolan enters – her way cleared as best he can by Christophe the chauffeur – the singer on the low stage midway along one long wall hits an especially high and plangent note and uses the cable remote in her pocket to turn her collar to high speed. Batteries in the remote power up a tiny motor attached to unbalanced weights within the device itself, making the collar burr against the girl’s throat just over her voice box so that she produces a sort of staccato ululation impossible to achieve without such mechanical artifice. The drummer has both sticks blurring in between the lower and upper snares, creating a crazed percussive accompaniment to match.

“Your table, ma’am,” Christophe says, quickly dusting and polishing a seat with its back against the wall of a semicircular booth set almost directly opposite the band. He called ahead from the car to book this small, neatly placed table and the previous occupants are still arguing with elements of the management even as their half-finished drinks are being tidied away by white-jacketed waiters.

Madame d’Ortolan eyes the seat sceptically, then sighs, smooths her skirt and sits, prim and upright while Christophe pushes the chair in. She can see the one who is probably the Oh person making his way through the crowds towards her. He is dressed like a peasant and has either a peasant’s skin tone or just that neither-one-thing-nor-the-other colour that Madame d’Ortolan finds irritating. He arrives, stands in front of her, glancing at the towering presence of Christophe. He smiles at her, rubbing his hands. He bows sinuously. “Madame.”

“Yes?”

“Aiman Q’ands. At your service.”

“Sit,” she tells him. She has already forgotten the name he has just spoken. To her he is still Oh. There is shouting beyond the mouth of the alcove, where the table’s earlier occupants have noticed that their drinks have been tidied away. A waiter flaps a pristine white tablecloth across the table, lets it settle and turns to take her order as the greasy-looking little man sits. Christophe, standing greyly behind her, divides his time between looking suspiciously at the man who has just arrived and looking suspiciously at the arguing punters, now in the first stages of being shooed away by the management and a couple of bouncers who have just drifted up and who are even larger than Christophe.

Aiman Q’ands bows from a seated position. “Always a pleasure to see you-”

“I do not require your pleasantries,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him, “and you should not expect mine.” This one, she recalls, surveying his smiling, shining, annoyingly anonymous coffee-coloured face, has always responded well to being kept thoroughly in his place. She turns briefly to Christophe and glances at her shoulder; he lifts the cream jacket from her shoulders and places it carefully over the back of her seat. She suspects that he lets his fingers linger just a fraction longer than fully necessary as they touch her flesh through her silk blouse, and that he surreptitiously sniffs at her hair as he bends to her. This is agreeable but distracting. “Still water,” she informs the waiter. “Bring it sealed. No ice.”

“Double espresso,” Aiman Q’ands says. He flaps the collar of his kameez. “And water; lots of ice.” He drums his fingers on the table.

It is hot in Paris and hotter still in the Café Atlantique; the leisurely spinning ceiling fans are largely decorative. The small sweating men wearing the sandwich boards – which advertise today’s specials and the services of various bookmakers, lawyers, pawnbrokers, bail-bond companies and brothels as well as conveying the latest headlines and sports results – are there principally to create cooling draughts as they pelt up and down the aisles. They are surprisingly effective. Aiman Q’ands squirms in his seat, looking up and all around. His hands knead each other. He seems incapable of sitting still and is making Madame d’Ortolan feel even warmer. “Fan, Christophe,” she says over her shoulder. With a snap, a large lacy black fan is deployed and starts to move air gently past her face.

Aiman Q’ands sits forward, eyes glistening. “Madame, may I say-”

“No, you may not,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him. She glances about her with a look of some distaste. “We shall keep this to the minimum.”

Q’ands looks hurt. He sits back, looking down. “Madame, do you find me so repellent?”

As though she spared the wretch a thought at all! “Don’t be absurd,” she tells him. “I simply have no great desire to be here,” she says, a glance taking in the smokily cavernous space. “Aside from all else, these crowds are, perversely, highly attractive to bombers.”

“Christians?” Q’ands says, looking mildly surprised and also looking round.

“Of course Christians, you idiot!”

Q’ands shakes his head ruefully and tuts. “The religion of brotherly love. So sad.”

Just for a moment Madame d’Ortolan thinks he might be trying to make fun of her. You can never be sure in how much detail these passerines remember previous encounters with things, events or people. Could he be baiting her? She quickly dismisses the thought. “The religion of zealotry,” she informs him testily. “The religion that loves its martyrs, the religion of the doctrine of Original Sin, so that blowing even babies to smithereens is justifiable because they too are sinners.” She jerks her head and makes a sort of dry spitting sound. “A religion made for terrorism.”

She can see what might be a small smile on Q’ands’s unpleasantly glowing face and can feel perspiration starting to gather on her brow. She leans forward and lowers her voice. “Are you properly ambiented? Have you fully embedded here yet?” she asks. “Any idiot ought to know this. Do you?”

“I know what I know, ma’am,” he says quietly, for all the world as though trying to be mysterious. Meanwhile one leg is bouncing up and down as though he is trying to follow the beat of the Jupla band. The fellow is preposterous!

“Well, know that I wish to waste no further time here.” She glances up at Christophe, then has, annoyingly, to clear her throat loudly because he seems distracted by the Eurasian waif warbling on stage. Her chauffeur collects himself, follows her gaze as it flicks to the man seated opposite and, sticking his free hand into his grey tunic, produces what looks like a cigar tube and hands it to Q’ands.

He looks at it sadly and then places it in his chest satchel. “Also,” Q’ands says, “I am almost out of-”

“There are supplies for a dozen journeys in there,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him. “We’re not stupid. We can count.”

He shrugs. “My apologies for so obviously inconveniencing you.” He sounds hurt. He stands up and runs a hand through his wiry brown hair. As he turns to look out into the body of the salon, a sandwich-board man races past, clacking. The resultant breeze makes Q’ands’s salwar kameez flutter. “… See if I can intercept my coffee…”

“Sit down!” she snaps.

He turns back. “But you said-”

“Sit!”

He sits, looking still more wounded.

“There are certain instructions specific to this matter which have not been written down,” she says. Q’ands looks appropriately surprised. She is already finding the way his expression seems to reflect his internal state so immediately and accurately extremely vexing. Worryingly unprofessional, too, if he’s like this with everybody. Has he finally gone off the rails? How vexing if her long campaign to destabilise the fellow has finally succeeded just when she needs him at his most implacably efficient.

“Indeed?” he says. He looks mystified. Madame d’Ortolan half expects a cartoon thought-bubble bearing a big question mark to appear above his head.

“Indeed,” she tells him. “The written orders mention some names and actions that you may find surprising. Nevertheless, these instructions have been subject to particularly careful scrutiny at the highest level, by not one or two but several sufficiently security-cleared individuals and you may be assured that there is no mistake. Regarding the final action you are instructed to pursue in each case, ignore that course of action as written in your orders. Each of the subjects concerned is not to be forcibly transitioned; they are all to be elided. Killed. Expeditiously. Do you understand?”

Q’ands’s eyes widen. “I am to ignore my written orders?”

“In that one detail, yes.”

“Detail?” The fellow looks aghast, though probably more at the choice of word than the terminal severity of the action proposed.

“In writing,” Madame d’Ortolan explains patiently, “you are instructed to find the individuals named, close with them and take them away. The spoken amendment I am giving you now is to do all the above, except you are to kill them rather than kidnap them.”

“So that’s an order?”

“Yes. That is an order.”

“But-”

“The written orders issue from my office,” Madame d’Ortolan tells him, her voice acidic. “This verbal order is also from me, has also been appropriately vetted and approved, and post-dates the written orders. What about this sequence of events is difficult for you to comprehend?”

There is a hurt silence while the waiter delivers their order. When he goes, Q’ands says, “Well, I take it the verbal orders will be confirmed by written-”

“Certainly not! Don’t be an idiot! There are reasons why this is being handled in this manner.” Madame d’Ortolan sits forward, lowers her voice and softens it a little. “The Council,” she tells him, head tipped towards him, drawing him in, “even the Concern itself, is under threat, don’t you see? This must be done. These actions must be carried out. They may seem extreme, but then so is the threat.”

He looks unconvinced.

She sits back. “Just obey your orders, Q’ands. All of them.” She watches as Christophe unseals her bottle of water, wipes her glass with a fresh handkerchief and pours. She drinks a little. Q’ands looks most unhappy, but drinks his espresso, finishing it with indecent haste in a couple of tossed-back gulps. She has a sudden unbidden, unwelcome and unpleasant vision of his lovemaking being similarly abrupt and curtailed now. Where once, of course, he had been quite pleasantly proficient. She pushes the memory away as something best forgotten and nods beyond the booth. “Now you may go.”

He rises, gives a cursory bow and turns away.

Madame d’Ortolan says, “A moment.”

He sighs as he looks back at her. “Yes?”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Q’ands, ma’am.”

“Well, Q’ands, do you understand?”

His jaw works as though he is trying to control himself. “Of course,” he says, voice clipped. “I understand.”

She favours him with an icy smile. “As you might guess, this is altogether of particular importance to us, Q’ands. It is what one might term a high-tariff matter. The highest. The rewards for success will be as lavish as the sanctions for failure will-”

“Oh, madame,” he says loudly, holding out one hand to her, his voice pitched somewhere between exasperation and what certainly sounds like genuine insult. “Spare me.” He turns and leaves with a shake of his head, disappearing into the tumult.

Madame d’Ortolan is quite shocked.

My father was a brute, my mother was a saint. Dad was a big, powerful man. He was what they used to call free with his fists. In school he was kept back a year and hence was always the biggest boy in his class. Big enough to intimidate the teachers sometimes. Eventually he was thrown out for breaking another pupil’s jaw. According to him, it was a boy, a bully, from a couple of years above him. It was twenty years later and he was dead before we found out it had actually been a girl in his own class.

He always wanted to be a policeman but he kept failing the entry exams. He worked in the prison service until he was thrown out for being too violent. Feel free to make your own jokes.

My mother had a very strict religious upbringing. Her parents were members of a small sect called The First Church of Christ The Redeemer Our Lord’s Chosen People. Once I suggested that they had more words in their title than they did members. It was the only time she hit me. She was proud that she didn’t sleep with my father until after they were married, on the day she turned eighteen. I think she just wanted to be free of her parents and all their restrictions and rules. They always had a lot of rules. Before they could be wed dad had to promise the elders of the church and our local minister that he would have all his children raised strictly in the ways of the Church, though he only did this so that he could wash his hands of his parental responsibilities. He had as little to do with me as he could while I was growing up. He’d usually be reading his paper, lips moving silently, or listening to music on his headphones, humming loudly and out of tune. If I tried to attract his attention he’d put his paper down, scowling, and tell me to talk to my mother, or just glare at me without turning his music down and stab a finger first at me and then at the door. He liked country and western music, the more sentimental the better.

He made no secret of the fact that he had no faith himself, except that “There must be something up there,” as he would say sometimes when he was very drunk. He said it quite a lot.

My mum must have seen something in him. Perhaps, as I said, she also thought that she was escaping from the petty rules and regulations and restrictions she’d had to accept living in her parents’ house, but of course dad had plenty of those of his own, as we both discovered. My usual way of discovering a new rule was being slapped around the ear, or, if I’d been really bad, dad taking his belt off, throwing me across his knee and leathering me. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, that’s what it was for my mum. I started out in the fire.

Mum made me her treasured boy and gave me all the love that she wanted to give dad but which just bounced back off him. Don’t think that she turned me into a gay or anything. I’m not. I’m quite normal. I just had this unbalanced upbringing in this strange family where one parent worshipped me and thought I could do no wrong and the other one treated me like some pet that my mum had bought without asking him first. If I’d thought about it I’d have assumed my family was typical. It wasn’t something I did think about, though, and I’d never have thought of asking other children what their families were like. I didn’t mix much with other children at school. They seemed very noisy and dangerously boisterous and they thought I was quiet, apparently. Or cold. I was teased and picked on for being Christian.

I suppose people would say it was a troubled upbringing but it didn’t feel like that to me, not at the time and not really since, not properly. Just one of those things. I worked hard in class and went for long walks in the country after school and at the weekends. I always did my homework to the highest standard. I spent a lot of time in the school library and the library in the nearest town, not always reading. On the bus to and from the town I used to sit looking at nothing.

We’d probably have rubbed along not too bad together, just the three of us, but then my sister came along. I don’t blame her, not really, not any more, but it was hard not to at the time. I didn’t know any better. It wasn’t her fault, even though she caused it.

We lived in the country in a line of prison-officer homes, within sight of the prison. I’d grown up listening to mum and dad arguing over the years because the walls were thin in the house. Though you couldn’t hear mum, just dad. She always kept her voice right down, whispering even, while he either shouted or just talked in his loud voice. I don’t think he ever whispered in his whole life. When you listened to them it was like he was arguing with himself, or with somebody who wasn’t there. I used to wrap my pillow round my head, covering both ears, or if it got really loud I’d stick my fingers in my ears and hum to myself to shut out the sound.

One time I must have been humming really loudly because the light went on and I opened my eyes and dad was there over me wearing just his underpants standing at the side of the bed and demanding what I thought I was doing making all this noise? He scowled at me as I lay there blinking in the bright overhead light, wiping my eyes and cheeks. I was sure he was going to hit me but he just made a grumbling sort of noise and left, slamming the door. He left the light on so I had to put it out myself.

I had already, over the course of the preceding few years, heard things I would not have chosen to hear, things about sex and so on, but the night mum came back from the hospital a week or thereabouts after giving birth to my sister was the thing that really made the difference, for me. Mum had had a bad time giving birth to me and she wasn’t really meant to have any more children, but then she got pregnant and that was that. Dad would just have soon have got rid of what turned into my sister but mum wasn’t having that because of her religion so she went through with it. But it was an unpleasant procedure and she needed a lot of stitches down there. I suppose dad must have been drunk – especially drunk, as he always liked a drink.

I tried humming but I knew they were talking about sex that evening when she came back from the hospital and because of the age I was a part of me was getting interested in sexual matters and so I partly wanted to listen, so I did. Thus I got to hear my mother begging my father to let her take him in her mouth, or even sodomise her, rather than have normal sex, due to the stitches and the fact that she was still very sore. I had heard dad in the past demanding these favours, or thought I had, but from the little I knew neither had actually occurred. That night, though, he wasn’t to be fobbed off with such distractions, especially not after months of being denied.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, he had his way with her, and I had to listen to the gasps and gulps and then the screams. A lot of screams, even though despite it all you could somehow tell that she was trying to be quiet about it. I shoved my fingers into my ears so hard that I thought I was going to puncture my eardrums, and I hummed as hard as I could, but I could still hear her.

It took much longer than you might imagine. Perhaps it was the drink, or the screams. But eventually the screams stopped, to be replaced by sobs and, shortly, snores.

I had, of course, imagined myself bursting in on them and hauling him off her and beating him up and so on, but I was only eleven, and slight, like her, not big and burly like him. Therefore there was nothing I could have done.

Meanwhile my sister had been set off by all the screaming and she was crying the way that very small babies do, and had probably been crying like that all the time but I hadn’t heard her over the screams from my mother and my own humming. I heard mum getting up from her and dad’s bed and going over to the cot and trying to comfort her, though you could hear her own voice breaking and her sobbing as she did this. Dad snored very loudly, and mum was sobbing and breaking down and my sister was screaming in a high, unpleasant whine. It was only at this point that our next-door neighbours started hammering on the wall, shouting, their voices like a sort of tired, distant commentary on events.

I am not ashamed to say that I cried quite a lot throughout the rest of that night, though I still dropped off to sleep eventually and got up for school the next day, because it is amazing what you can put up with and get over. Almost anything, in fact.

Nevertheless, I think it was then that I decided I would never get married or have children.