Silver eels streamed out of him, something leaking out of his life, and Ed leaking after it like a current of warmer water in a cold sea. That night was no different to any other experience in the fishtank, except perhaps for an added, gluey distance to everything he saw. Everything in there was an effort that night. He woke up on the spaceport concrete perhaps an hour later. A salt night wind was blowing. He felt sick and cold. Annie Glyph was kneeling by him. He had the feeling that she had been there for some time. That she was prepared to wait however long it took. He coughed and heaved. She wiped his mouth.
“There,” she said.
“Jesus,” said Ed. “Hey,” he said. “How was I?”
“It was a short show. As soon as you put the fishtank on your head, you had some sort of spasm. That was what it looked like.” Annie smiled. “They weren’t convinced,” she went on, “until you got out of the chair.” He had got out of the chair, she told him, to stand facing the audience for maybe a minute in the shifting light, during which time he trembled and slowly pissed himself. “It was a real twink moment, Ed. I was proud of you.” After that some muffled sounds came out of the smoky-looking substance in the tank. He shrieked suddenly and began trying to wrestle it off his head. Then he passed out and fell his length into the front row of the audience. “They weren’t happy, and we had some problems with them after that. You know, they were corporates who had paid for special seats and you were sick on their good clothes. Madam Shen talked to them, but they seemed disappointed. We had to drag you out the back way.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“It didn’t look much. You spoilt your tuxedo, rolling about in your own piss.”
“But did I say anything?”
“Oh, you told the future. You did that all right.”
“What’d I say?”
“You talked about war. You said things no one wanted to hear. Blue babies floating out of wrecked ships in empty space. Frozen babies in space, Ed.” She shivered. “No one wants to hear that kind of thing.”
“There isn’t any war,” Ed pointed out. “Not yet.”
“But there will be, Ed. That’s what you said: ‘ War!’ ”
This meant nothing to Ed. After he had passed the part with the eels, instead of seeing his childhood in the house with the grey roof, he had watched himself step off his first rocket ship—a tubby little dynaflow freighter called the Kino Chicken—onto the parched soil of his first alien planet, with a broad sixteen-year-old leer on his face. The monkey was on his back. He was grooving on concepts of infinite travel and empty space. Always more. Always more after that. He stood at the top of the cargo ramp and shouted, “Alien planet!” Never regret anything, he promised himself there and then. Never go back. Never see them again, mothers, fathers, sisters who abandon you. It was no distance at all from that position to the death of Dany LeFebre which had hurt him so bad. It all led so inevitably from the Kino Chicken, through hyperdip, to the twink-tank.
He told Annie Glyph this, as they walked back across the concrete to her room.
“I had another name then,” he said.
Suddenly he thought he was going to be sick again. He crouched down and put his head between his knees. He cleared his throat. Annie touched his shoulder. After a bit he felt better, and was able to look up at her. “I let those people down tonight,” he said. She made him see, the way she always did, that massive calm patience of hers. He threw himself against it because it was what he had.
“If I’m predicting the future,” he said desperately, “why do I always see the past?”
22
Persistent Entities
It was late. People hurried in and out of the restaurants and cinemas, heads down into the wet and windy night. The trains were still running. Michael Kearney zipped his jacket up. While he walked, he got on his cellphone and made an effort to raise Brian Tate, first at Tate’s home, then at the Sony offices in Noho. No one was answering—although at Sony a recording tried to lure him into the maze of automated corporate response—and he soon put the phone away again. Anna caught up with him twice. The first time was at Hammersmith, where he had to stop and buy a ticket.
“You can follow me all you like,” Kearney told her. “It won’t help.”
She gave him a flushed, obstinate look, then pushed her way through the ticket barrier and down to the eastbound platform where—the light of a malfunctioning fluorescent flickering harshly across the upper half of her face—she challenged him: “What good’s your life been? Honestly, Michaeclass="underline" what good has it been?”
Kearney took her by the shoulders as if to shake her; looked at her instead. Began to say something ugly; changed his mind.
“You’re being ridiculous. Go home.” She set her mouth.
“You see? You can’t answer. You haven’t got an answer.”
“Go home now. I’ll be all right.”
“That’s what you always said. Isn’t it? And look at you. Look how frightened and upset you are.”
Kearney shrugged suddenly.
“I’m not afraid,” he said, and walked off again.
Her disbelieving laugh followed him down the platform. When the train came she stood as far away from him as she could in the crowded carriage. He lost her briefly in the late-night mêlée at Victoria, but she picked him up again and struggled grimly after him through a crowd of laughing Japanese teenagers. He set his teeth, got off the train two stops early and walked as fast as he could for a mile or so, into the light and activity of West Croydon and out into the suburban streets the other side. Whenever he looked back she had fallen further behind: but she always kept him in sight somehow, and by the time he knocked at Brian Tate’s door she had caught him up again. Her hair was slicked down to her scalp, her face was flushed and exasperated; but she blinked the rain out of her eyes and gave him one of those brilliant, strained smiles, as if to say:
“You see?”
Kearney knocked at the door again, and they stood there in an angry truce with their luggage in their hands, waiting for something to happen. Kearney felt a fool.
Brian Tate’s house was situated in a quiet, hilly, tree-lined street with a church at one end and a retirement home at the other. It boasted four floors, a short gravelled driveway between laurels, mock-Tudor timbering over pebbledash. On summer evenings you would be able to watch foxes sniffing about among the licheny apple trees in the garden at the rear. It had the air of a house that had been used mildly and well all its existence. Children had been brought up there, and sent on to the kinds of schools suited to children from houses like these, after which they had made careers in brokerage and then had children of their own. It was a modest, successful house, but there was something gloomy about it now, as if Brian Tate’s occupancy had disconcerted it.
When no one answered the door, Anna Kearney put down her bag and went to stand on tiptoe in the flower bed beneath one of the windows.
“Someone’s in,” she said. “Listen.”
Kearney listened, but he couldn’t hear anything. He went round to the back of the house and listened there, but all the windows were dark and there was nothing to hear. The rain came down quietly on the garden.
“He’s not here.”
Anna shivered. “Someone’s in,” she repeated. “I saw him looking out at us.”
Kearney rapped on the window.
“See?” Anna called excitedly. “He moved!”
Kearney got his cellphone out and dialled Tate’s number. “Knock on the door again,” he said, putting the phone to his ear. He got an old-fashioned answer machine and said, “Brian, if you’re there, pick up. I’m outside your house and I need to talk to you.” The tape ran for half a minute then stopped. “For God’s sake Brian, I can see you in there.” Kearney was dialling again when Tate opened the front door and looked out uncertainly. “It’s no good doing that,” he said. “I keep the phone somewhere else.” He was wearing some kind of heavily insulated silver parka over cargo pants and a T-shirt. A wave of heat came out of the door behind him. The hood of the parka obscured his face, but Kearney could see that it was hollow and tired-looking, in need of a shave. He looked from Kearney to Anna, then back again.