Since he already stood with his eyes lifted to the topmost tablecloth-sized leaves of the immeasurable giants, Michael thought that he might risk another cautious squint at the unlikely firmament that lay beyond the curling ironwork and Coca-Cola bottle panes that formed the covering of the great arcade.
It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected but, once looked at, it was very difficult to look away. Its colour, or at least its colour over that giant stretch of passage where he found himself, was a more deep and priceless azure than he could have previously imagined. Further off along the mighty hall and at the limits of what he could see from where he stood, the regal blue appeared to have ignited, to have melted down to furnace reds and golds. Michael glanced back across his shoulder, looking down the stunning corridor the other way, and saw that at its most remote extremes the boundless sky, which could be seen through the glass panels of the arcade’s ceiling, was on fire. As with the blue above, the hotter hues he could see flaring in the distance seemed almost fluorescent in their brilliance, like the unreal shades you sometimes got in films. However, though the sizzling colours of the heavens were most certainly arresting, it was the unearthly bodies drifting through that vista that had seized Michael’s attention. It was these that made the sight almost impossible to tear his gaze away from.
They weren’t clouds, although they were as variously sized and just as graceful and unhurried in their motion. They were more, he thought, like blueprint drawings that someone had done of clouds. For one thing you could only see their pallid silver graphite lines and not their contours. For another, all those lines were straight. It was as if some very clever student of geometry had been assigned the task of modelling every crease and convolution of the drifting cumuli, so that each cloud’s shape was constructed from a million tiny facets. The effect was more like haphazardly crumpled balls of paper, albeit paper he could see through to discern the lines and angles of their every inner complication. This meant also that the blazing background colours of the sky were visible between the intricate and ghostly limning of the floating diagrams.
Beside their gradual drift across the mile-wide ribbon of celestial blue that he could see through the emporium’s roof, he noticed that the forms were also moving and contorting slowly in themselves as they progressed across the sky, the way that real clouds did. Instead of languid and unfurling tongues of vapour, though, the movement here was that, again, of badly crinkled vellum as it gradually unfolded from its scrunch in the recesses of a wicker paper-basket. Faceted extrusions crept and crackled as the towering heaps of blueprint-weather lazily unpacked themselves, and there was something in the way that the interior lines and angles moved which he found fascinating, though he struggled to define exactly what it was.
It was a bit like if you had a cube of paper but were looking at it from end on, so that you couldn’t see it was a cube with sides, and all you saw was a flat square. Then, if you turned the cube or changed your viewpoint slightly, all its true depth would swing into view and you would understand that you were looking at a solid shape, not just a cut-out.
This was like that, only taken a stage further. In the shifting of the geometric tangles he surveyed, it was as if he gazed directly at something he took to be a cube, but then it was rotated or his vantage somehow altered, so that it turned out to be a much more complicated form, as different from a cube as cubes were from flat squares of paper. It was a lot cubier, for a start, with its lines running in at least one more direction than there really were. He stood there balanced on the framing edge of the square vat behind him, head tipped back so he could goggle at the spectacle above, and tried to think it through.
The strange new solids blossoming within the crenellations of the diagram-clouds were ones that Michael had no names for, though he found he had an inkling of the way in which they were constructed. Thinking of the paper cube that he’d imagined earlier, Michael realised that if you unfolded it then you’d have six flat squares of paper joined together in a Jesus-cross. The shapes that crawled across the endless strip of skylight overhead, however, were more like what Michael thought you’d get if you could somehow take six or more cubes and fold them all up neatly into one big super-cube.
How long had he been standing frozen on the tank’s rim, gaping up into the churning mathematics? Suddenly alarmed, he looked down to the wooden plain of windows stretching all around him and was pitifully relieved to find that Phyllis Painter was still standing patiently a yard or three away across the smooth-planed planks that were the arcade’s floor, close to another of the inlaid holes. She looked at him accusingly, as did four dozen of the dead and gleaming rabbit eyes that sequined her repulsive stole, like shotgun pellets blasted into velvet.
“If yer’ve finished gawkin’ at the gret big ’ouses like yer’ve just got ’ere from Bugbrook, then perhaps we can be on ayr way. I’ve better things to waste me death on than just showing shroud-shocked little kids abayt.”
Flinching at the sharp edge her voice had taken on, Michael jumped down obediently from the raised edge of his former living room’s tiered framework, to the smooth pine floorboards she was standing on. He padded dutifully across to her, the sash-tie of his tartan dressing gown undone and trailing round his slippers, then stood looking up at her as if awaiting fresh instructions. Phyllis sighed again, theatrically, and shook her head. It was a very grown-up mannerism that belied her years, but then that was how all the little girls around the Boroughs acted, much like Russian dolls that had been taken from inside their unscrewed mothers and were just the same, but smaller.
“Well, come on, then.”
She turned with a maypole swirl of dangling rabbit hides and started to walk off across the width of the titanic corridor, towards the bounding wall on Michael’s right with all its balconies and shops and buildings piled higgledy-piggledy, perhaps a half-a-mile away. After a moment’s hesitation Michael trotted after her and, as he did so, happened to glance down into the great square vat that she’d been standing near, the next one up the line from that which Michael had himself emerged from.
It was almost perfectly identical, down to the details of the beaded moulding, enlarged and inverted, that made up the tiered steps from the tank’s sides down to the sunken jelly-cube that was its centrepiece. Michael could even see the patch of flaking paint that looked like Britain sprawling on its back, playing with Ireland like a deformed kitten with a ball of wool. This was his living room again, but when he peered down at the central tableau’s depths Michael discovered that the jewellery was altered. The green mother-shape that had contained his yellow child-shape was now gone, and only the extended gem-fern caterpillars representing Michael’s gran and sister still remained. The amethyst Swiss roll that was his sister trailed across the room’s floor, up onto some sort of raised plateau which Michael reasoned must be the armchair that stood to one side of the fire. Here it curled into a stationary loop in which the violet sparks looked dull and sluggish, like a disconsolate Catherine Wheel. Meanwhile the bigger, spinier glass animal that was his gran, lit from within by autumn bonfire lights, coiled back and forth in tight loops through the mammoth kitchen door. It was as if his sister was slumped still and sobbing in the fireside armchair while their grandmother kept popping from the kitchen to the living room to see if the unhappy infant was all right. Michael concluded that this was the next brief time-slice in the continuity of their back room, some moments after his mum Doreen had rushed out into the passage, carrying in her arms the child she did not realise was already dead. All of the sunken window-frames in this particular unending row, he thought, must open down upon the same place but at different points in time. He had an urge to run along the file of apertures and follow the sequential glimpses of his living room as if they were a story in the Dandy, but his escort, draped in dead things, was already some way off, heading across the endless corridor and not along it. Stifling his curiosity, he hurried to catch up with her.