Nearly three miles to the castle: a fanfare sounded from its battlements would take, what, twelve seconds to reach him. A determined snail would cover the ground in four days. The flash of a mirror held by Rapunzel at her window, a seventy-thousandth of a second. Fast and slow, big and small. How much of human life is orientation?
We are, thinks Dan, consciously opening his frontal lobe’s throttle valve, speckles of mould on the surface of a moist, gassy sphere of rock left accidentally whirling around a pathetic star. This devastating Copernican heresy is now a commonplace — the blue marble, the third stone. Yes, yes. But wait! Speckles of mould? Yes. Really? Yes: me, you, the baby. Three speckles. Our nondescript star buried in a big wheel of stuff. Big, big, yes. Stuff — heavy bits and bobs — gathers itself into these wheels. Big-bigger wheels devour big-littler wheels. Between: space, emptyish (quantum cameos like popping candy). Gravity a pull; angular momentum a dance. The stuff created out of energy. The energy happened — bang — because. Because we’re asking. Who’s asking? Mould. The universe a finite bubble of being with no edge, no outside worth worrying about, only an inside. Observable. Energy conservable. Quantum swervable. One of many? You choose — it doesn’t matter. Creator? Word games and mind games, only. Harmless fancies, yes. But the thing itself no speculation, no hypothesis, no fable — arranged in plain sight above our heads, the arm of our galaxy hanging there like one stupendous fucker of an arch, others beyond it, others beyond them, and beyond, and beyond. It took us a long time to figure out what we were looking at; to forget again, not long at all.
And the mould itself, the curious infestations on that sun-bathed moisty marble — what of that? Soup accident, yes. Outlandish molecules stumble on the property of self-replication: a chemical freak that simmers discreetly for aeons and then suddenly, recently, gets out of hand. Mutate, select, repeat. In the blink of a geological eye, the planet is crawling with beasties. A single forest that stretches to the curved horizon is home to a trillion trees. Every tree a world, every leaf, the gut of every bug.
Replicating, fornicating beasties, each a thermodynamic house of cards, improbable, expendable, ready to dissolve: if a lucky few perform their party trick, their replication, that’s enough. Mutate, select, repeat. Can’t pause it, can’t switch it off. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and then — a gasp, and a hush. Another, stranger accident. Self; angst; not Eve who ate the apple but that blind watchmaker gone berserk. Repenting now, perhaps.
One red kite keens loudly above and another replies; a buffet of wind lifts Dan’s hair and lays it down in the fair approximation of a caress. With three strokes, the shadow of a long, low rag of cloud recolours in softer tones the western row of trees, the walk, the eastern row.
Mould with attitude. We are. But material orientation is not enough.
The heart of Mike Vickers is about as heavy as the mahogany box that he sets down on the table beside the drained glass and empty bottle of ’82. He flips the clasp; the lid swings back until restrained by two gold chains. Mounted and framed inside it, as though on the screen of a ridiculous laptop, is a print of the famous, luminous portrait. In the box, two snug, artfully arranged compartments: a leather folder (letters, memoranda, copies of wills all in slip cases — the provenance) and a small, velvet-lined and Perspex-lidded display case.
Mike locks eyes with the portrait’s subject. Receding hair, discreet lippy, a nose that swells as you look at it. Sly bastard. Wheeler-dealer. Winner. Mike, by contrast, has been well and truly rumbled: fraud, bluffer, loser. The other box — the MRI — is to be closed. ‘Nothing personal,’ said the Generalissimo, cheerfully, eyes already wandering back to his screens. ‘Wrong market for us. Live and learn. Spot for you on the execution desk.’
Victoria is looking for something more serious; Lulu is in Milan and might not come back; Carmen has just announced her civil partnership on Facebook. Good luck to them. Nothing personal.
Time for that clean break? PhD? Hobby farm? Not-for-profit? Dry stone walling? He looks down at his slim, pinkish fingers. Never built so much as a Lego tower. All the maths forgotten. At that moment, realisation opens a scathing yellow eye: the fault doesn’t lie in his profession. His half-hearted defences of the investment industry are all basically, depressingly sound. You don’t have to lay actual bricks one upon the other to contribute something useful. The fault lies rather in himself. In his own incapacities and bad choices: the world’s technicalities a mystery his brain is not equipped to penetrate, its moral endeavours unfathomable to a shallow heart. A swindled silver spoon up his arse. Good for nothing.
He opens the small display case, pinches the glinting object from its velvety cleft and holds it between his finger and thumb. Looks at the portrait, at the object, at the portrait, back to the object. Dan has his electrons (and more), Brenda her mountains, James his words — even Pete Walley, it turns out, plays mean improv piano. Mike Vickers has this only. His one claim on the universe, staked by means of a transaction.
He rises, walks to his colossal hall mirror. Holds the object up to its rightful place. Stares. Leans closer, closer, until his forehead is pressed on the glass. Stepped in so far. Stepped in what? How far?
Shakespeare’s putative earring slips from his worthless fingers, glances off his shoe and rolls onto the doormat. He doesn’t stoop to pick it up.
Natalie’s friend Rachel raises a questioning eyebrow when she orders an Appletiser in the riverside gastropub, and Natalie has to laugh and shake her head. A curious thing, how pregnancy begins with a flurry of lies.
The little art festival was surprisingly good. She might even dig out her pen and ink when she gets home. One particular portrait triggered a shiver of sadness — an act of preservation, deeply personal, infused with knowing as no photograph can be. There is no portrait of Dan.
But this is a day to speak of other things. It is Dan’s absence, after all, that restores Rachel to her intimate, confiding, insightful best. The two friends eat, talk, laugh and treat themselves to dessert. As they part — one to her car, the other towards the station — they solemnly agree to reconvene. Rachel has already driven away when Natalie frowns abruptly and turns back to the pub.
The monochrome faces of a hundred ladies with bouffant hair stare down from the papered walls and door of the toilet cubicle. Even the ceiling. Some of the faces are smugly smiling, some scornful, some apparently ready to pass out; a few offer pitying frowns. Black and white chequerboard floor, white porcelain, black seat.
Somewhere a cistern falls silent, so that the only sound is Natalie’s breath ringing in the reverberant space. In the white bowl, glaring up between her white thighs, and blotted thickly across the white pants hammocked between her white knees: a precipitous shock of scarlet.
Dan exerts his fading muscles to shift in his chair. A spot of rain pricks his windward cheek; tickles pleasantly — unreachable, unwipeable there. He stares into the distance, northward along the Long Walk, still engaged in orientation.
Mould with attitude. Indeed — in one hot and fertile sweet spot, the intersection of improbable statistics, mutate-select-repeat happens upon a configuration with unprecedented élan. A mechanism unknown in all the earth’s astonishing biological engineering: reason. The power to exploit and subdue. Reason masters fire; annihilates with spears the stupider beasts; invents farming instead; axe, rope, wheel. Clear-fells whole countries, slashes, burns, replants, makes deserts bloom, dredges a harvest out of helpless oceans, slaughters and weeps at the slaughter and slaughters again.