She laughed again, less loudly and, he thought, not quite so kind.
“Ha! You ent found yer Lucy-lips yet. That’s why what yer saying clangs out wrong. Just give it linger and yer’ll soon be spooking properly. But as for where you wizzle be before, there ent no go-back. Life’s behind yer now.”
She nodded past him, and it sank in that her last remark had been intended as more than a turn of phrase. She’d meant his life was currently behind him. With his neck-hairs tingling as they lifted, Michael swivelled carefully to look at it.
He found that he’d been standing with his back turned to the very edge of the huge, square-shaped tank he’d been dragged up from, with a worrying drop beneath him at his slipper-heels. The area he was looking at, while not much bigger than the children’s boating lake he’d seen once at the park, was certainly much deeper, to the point where Michael couldn’t tell exactly how far down it went. The great flat pool was filled up to its brim with the same wobbly, half-set glass that he had lately been suspended in. The surface was still quivering slightly, no doubt from the violent jerk with which he’d been pulled out.
As Michael peered down through the shuddering substance he could make out still forms that extended through the glazed depths, motionless and twisted trunks of intricately textured gemstone that were wound around each other as they stretched across the space beneath. He thought it might look a bit like a coral garden, though he hadn’t really got a clear idea of what those words actually meant. The interwoven strands with all their branches and their surfaces seemed to be made of something you could see through, like a hard, clear wax. These frilly, tangling cables had no colour of their own, but you could look inside them to where lights of every shade swam back and forth. He could distinguish at least three of the long convoluted tubes, each with its own specific inner hue, as they snaked in amongst each other through the rubbery fathoms trembling far below, like an ice-statue of a gorgeous knot.
The thickest and most well-developed of the stems, lit from inside by a predominantly greenish glow, was the one Michael thought looked nicest, though he couldn’t have told anyone precisely why. It had a peaceful quality about it, with the sculpted emerald bough stretched right across the massive box of shivering light, from where it entered through a tall rectangle in the vat’s far wall, then coiled around the monster fish-tank prettily towards him before curving off to Michael’s left and exiting his field of vision through another looming aperture.
He thought it was an interesting coincidence that both these openings were in the same relation to each other as the doors that led out from their living room down Andrew’s Road into the kitchen and the passageway, although these entrances were vastly bigger, more like those you’d find in a cathedral or perhaps a pyramid. As he looked closer with his improved eyes he saw that there was even a black tunnel cut low down into the right-side wall halfway along, in the precise location that their fireplace would be if it were huger and if he were staring down at it from a position up above.
While he was pondering this unlikely similarity he noticed that his favourite frond, the green one, had a rippling and attractive ruff along one side up near the top, resembling a stripe of fanning mushroom gills. At the point where the complicated cable of translucent jade bent to the left, which was the point where it was also nearest him, he had the opportunity to view these gills side-on and realised with a jolt that he was looking at an endless row of duplicated human ears. Only when Michael saw that every one was wearing an identical facsimile of his mum Doreen’s favourite clip-on button earrings did he understand at last what he’d been gawping at.
The jelly-flooded chamber, weird as any undiscovered planet, was in fact their dear, familiar living room but somehow swollen up to a terrific size. The luminous, contorted crystal shafts laced through it were the bodies of his family, but with their shapes repeated and projected through the chandelier-like treacle of their atmosphere, the way that Michael’s arms and legs had looked when he himself was floundering in the viscous emptiness. The difference was that these extended figures were immobile, and the images that they were made from didn’t promptly fade out of existence in the way that his spare limbs had done. It was as though while people were still living they were really frozen motionless, immersed in the congealed blancmange of time, and simply thought that they were moving, when in truth it was just their awareness fluttering along the pre-existing tunnel of their lifetime as a ball of coloured light. Apparently, only when people died, as Michael seemed to have just done, were they released from the containing amber and allowed to rise up spluttering and splashing through the aspic of the hours.
The biggest, greenest structure, that he’d already expressed a preference for, was Michael’s mum, passing at great speed through the living room, from kitchen door to passageway. He dimly calculated that in normal circumstances this would only take his mother a few instants, which suggested that the slice of time on permanent display in this capacious tank was, at the most, ten seconds thick. Even so, you could tell from the tortuous interweaving of the sunken lumps that quite a lot was going on.
The curling reef of bottle-glass that was his mother — he could now discern her lime-lit features shuffled through the ridge’s uppermost protrusion like a stack of see-through masks — appeared to have a bright fault all along the greater part of its extraordinary length. Where it grew into the enclosure on its far side, through the towering gap beneath the waterline that was in actuality their now-enormous kitchen door, the green mass had a smaller form enclosed within, a roughly star-shaped splotch of radiant primrose running through its centre like the lettering in a stick of rock. This inner glow remained inside the gooseberry-toned configuration from the point at which it surged in via the chasm of the doorway, following it as it briefly veered to Michael’s right and then resumed its path towards him, a manoeuvre undertaken to avoid the obstacle of a drowned mesa that he reasoned must be their living-room table. It was here, however, right between the table and the yawning cavern of the fireplace, that the yellow brilliance seemed to leak out from the moulded olive vessel that contained it. A diffused gold plume rose smokily through the engulfing negative-space gelatine, a cloudy and unravelling woollen strand of lemonade that trailed up to the gumdrop pane of the vat’s surface quite near Michael’s plaid-clad feet as he stood on the framing wood surround. It looked like clean bath water somebody had done a wee in. The soft star-shape with its five blunt points was still inside the greater rolling bulk as this swerved to one side and went out by the presently colossal passage door on his far left, but now it was a colourless and empty hole amidst the warm, enfolding green. The summer light had all drained out of it.
After a while it came to Michael that this had been him, this frail five-petal marigold of brightness which at first glance seemed to be inside the larger crystalline arrangement that was Michael’s mum. She had been carrying him with both arms in front of her, so that her wider contours seemed to swallow his as she rushed forward in her stream of repetitions. And the point in her trajectory between the table and the fireplace where his smaller light switched off, that was where he had died, where life had cracked and his awareness had seeped into the enveloping consommé of coagulated time. The yellow traces straggling upwards in the prism-syrup were the ones that his pyjama-swaddled consciousness had left behind when he’d dog-paddled up and through the ceiling.
He gazed down into the grotto at the submarine contortions of the other two illuminated ferns, a spiky russet hedge of what looked like refrigerated orange pop and which he took to be his gran, and then a pale mauve tube much closer to the floor that had a violet torch-beam flare dancing inside it. He assumed this was his sister, flickering with all her purple thoughts. With its delicious paint-box tints and its aquatic layers of transparency, Michael could see why the unnerving girl who’d hoisted him aloft had spoken of it as “the jewellery”. It was delicate and beautiful, but he thought there was something sad about it, too. Despite its shifting, coruscating sparks the ornamental diorama had the look of a forgotten snarl of river-bottom junk, so that it seemed a common and neglected thing.