Ed grinned despite himself.
“Just look at it,” he marvelled. “How d’you think they made it?”
Then he shook his head. “As to achievements,” he said, “Billy Anker picked this peach. I watched him pick it ten, twelve years ago. If I remember anything, I remember that.” He shrugged. “Of course, Billy never came back. You don’t get the tick unless you come back.”
Something about this mindless philosophy made Sandra Shen smile to herself. She stared up at the image on the screens for a moment or two. Then she said softly: “Hey, Ed.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t Annie. Annie was real.”
“I’m glad,” Ed said.
The wormhole opened to receive him.
During the transit, he fell asleep. He didn’t understand why, though even in his sleep he suspected that Madam Shen had organised it. He slumped in the pilot seat with his head on one side, couch-potatoed and breathing heavily through his mouth. Behind closed lids, his eyes flickered in REM manoeuvres, a simple but urgent code.
What he dreamed was this:
He was back in the family house. It was autumn—heavy, felted airs and rain. His sister came down from the father’s study carrying the lunch tray. Ed skulked about in the shadows on the landing, then jumped out on her. “Haraaar!” he said. “Oops.” Too late. The lunch tray slipped out of her hands in the wet light from the window. A hard-boiled egg rolled about in dipping, eccentric arcs, then bounced away down the stairs. Ed ran after it, going, “Yoiy yoiy yoiy!” His sister was upset. After that she didn’t speak to him. He knew it was because of what he had seen before he jumped out. She was already holding the lunch tray in one hand. With the other, she was pulling her clothes about as if they didn’t fit properly. Her hands were already relaxing, soft and strengthless. She was already crying.
“I don’t want to be the mother,” she was telling herself.
That was the point everything went wrong in Ed’s life. Nothing after that was as bad, even when his father stood on the black kitten; and anyone who claimed it had gone wrong before that, they didn’t know anything.
A voice said: “Time to forgive yourself these things.”
Ed half-woke, felt the soft inside of the wormhole touch the ship, contract. He smiled loosely, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, slept once more, this time without dreams. Protected by the violent glow of alien engines, cocooned and cosseted by the ironic smile and unknowable motives of the entity at that time calling itself Sandra Shen, he was borne with grace and without incident down a birth canal a million years old. Or more. At the end of which, deep light would explode in upon him, in ways none of us can imagine.
31
I’ve Been Here
After he ran out of the cottage, Michael Kearney was thrown back for a last time into his own memory, where he saw himself, twenty years old, returning from his last innocent train journey to find a short, badly dressed woman walking up and down the taxi rank outside Charing Cross station, where the action of the Tarot cards had stranded him. She was holding up a letter in her right hand and shouting:
“You bloody piece of paper, you bloody piece of paper!”
Greying hair straggled down around a broad face reddened with effort. A maroon woollen coat, thick as carpet, compressed her fat breasts. “You bloody piece of paper!” she cried. As if trying for some final, indisputable delivery, she varied the emphasis on this accusation until it had illuminated briefly every word. She had a duty of expression, you felt, to the forces inside her. It was work for her, work of the hardest sort, hawked up from somewhere deep. Kearney couldn’t repress a shudder. But no one else seemed bothered: instead, they regarded her with a cautious, even affectionate, amusement, especially when her back was to them. When Kearney’s turn came at the head of the queue, she stopped in front of him and caught his eye. She was short, stout. The smell that clung to her reminded him of empty houses, old clothes, mice. Her sense of drama, the intractable rawness of her emotion, left him unnerved.
“Piece of paper!” she shouted at him. He saw that the letter was old, shiny with use, falling apart at the folds. “You bloody piece!” She held it out to him. Kearney stared mutely away, aching with embarrassment. He tapped his foot.
“You bloody written thing!” she said.
He shook his head. He thought perhaps she wanted money. “No,” he said, “I—”
A taxi roared into the Charing Cross forecourt and pulled up next to him with a squeal of brakes. Dazzled briefly by the sunlight dancing in the raindrops on its bonnet, he seemed to lose sight of her. In a trice, she had reached in close and tucked the paper deftly into one of his jacket pockets. When he looked up, she was gone. On the paper he found not a letter but an address in Cambridge, written in blue ink as old as himself. He brought it close to his face. Reading it seemed to exhaust him. When the folds gave way, and it fell into lace in his hands, he redirected the taxi, caught another train and went home. There, depressed, worn out, unable to convince himself of the need to unpack his bag, he realised that he had memorised the address without wanting to. He tried to work. He sat dealing cards until it got dark, then—perhaps in a bid to remind himself of the triviality of all this—prowled from bar to bar, drinking restlessly, hoping to meet Inge Neumann and have her tell him with a laugh:
“It’s just a bit of fun.”
Next afternoon he stood in the rain where the paper had led him, across the street from a substantial old suburban house, detached, three or four storeys high, in gardens half-hidden behind a wall of attractively spalled red brick.
He had no idea why he had come.
He stood there until his clothes were soaked, but made no move to leave. Children ran up and down the street. At half past four there was a brief increase in traffic. As the rain cleared and the afternoon light shifted west, the brickwork took on a warm orange colour, and the garden wall seemed to recede a little, as if the street had widened; at the same time it seemed to stretch, becoming taller and longer. A little later, the woman in the wool coat waddled into view, breathing heavily and wiping her face. She crossed the road and, walking straight through the wall, disappeared.
“Wait!” gasped Kearney, and flung himself after her.
He had the sense of penetrating something membranous which clung elastically to his face. Then he heard a voice say: “It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,” and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them.
Odd items of furniture remained in the house, as if some tenant hadn’t quite abandoned it. It was cold in there. Kearney went from room to room, stopping to examine an old-fashioned brass fender, a wooden ironing board folded up like an insect in a corner. He thought he heard people whispering in the rooms above; a laugh cut off by a sudden intake of breath.
The Shrander was waiting for him in the master bedroom. He could see her clearly through the open door, standing at the bay window. Light poured round her thickened, monolithic silhouette, transfiguring the bare floor of the room, then spilled out onto the landing at Kearney’s feet, illuminating the rolls of dust beneath the cream-painted skirting board. Arranged on an inlaid table just inside the door he could see: books of matches; condoms in squares of foil; fans of Polaroid snapshots; a pair of oversized dice with symbols he didn’t recognise.