‘He-e-ey kids! Yogi here! Check out all the games in my cave!’
‘Hello, silly bear!’ shouts Lily, and laughs.
The roundabout is one of those miniature ones for small children, the kind with one tractor, one car, one double-decker bus, each with its own little steering wheel so the children can pretend they’re driving. All the vehicles have friendly faces. There is a cheeky space rocket, for instance, and a brave fire engine with a determined frown. There are also a few animals among them: a big chicken, a pale blue elephant, a pretty pink horse with a golden harness and big blue long-lashed eyes.
‘I want to go on the horse,’ Lily says.
Ralph goes to pay the man in charge, who has black greasy hair and a thin pockmarked face, and is wearing one of those dark camouflage jackets you see on men who like to fantasise about war. He takes Ralph’s money without a flicker of acknowledgement. Not that Lily cares. With Eve’s help, she’s already climbing up onto the horse. ‘It’s bear-i-fic!’ says the fibreglass bear in the distance. A cold wind blows diesel fumes towards them from the roundabout’s generator
‘Hold on tight, darling!’ Eve calls out to her. ‘Take care!’
There are no other riders, no other children anywhere near, as the roundabout begins to turn, its lights rippling and its speakers tooting out a Mary Poppins medley. ‘Spoonful of Sugar’ segues into ‘Chim-Chim Cher-ee’ as Ralph and Eve stand in the drizzle on opposite sides of the ride, watching their daughter going round and round. They never even glance at one another.
Lily waves proudly to her mum and dad. She bounces up and down. She cranes round to look at the riderless animals and empty vehicles, all circling round for no one’s benefit but hers. Then she throws back her head and laughs.
Lily’s laughter on that little horse, her peals of happy laughter: ten, twenty, thirty years later, they will still echo in Ralph’s mind when he lies awake at night. He knows this already, even now, when the original laughter is still there in front of him and the roundabout is still turning to the merry tune of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’. Numb as he is, cut off as he is from his own feelings about everything except the golden dream of Ianthe, he knows that when the dream has passed, and the Czar has been toppled from his throne, that laugh will haunt him all his life.
When the roundabout stops, Ralph goes back to the man in the military jacket.
‘Another go, please, mate. In fact can you make it a double turn this time?’
He glances briefly at Eve, but her attention is fixed firmly and entirely on Lily, who has decided to transfer to the little car for her next ride. Lily beams at her father as she settles into the car and waits for it to move. It’s true that something in his face makes her smile falter for a moment – something that was still lingering there as he turned to her from her mother – but when the roundabout starts up again, she forgets all that and gives her full attention to the car. And soon she’s laughing again, her small hands busily turning the steering wheel this way and that, though it’s connected to nothing at all.
14
Ooze
Go out into the middle of the ocean, turn vertically downwards, continue in that direction for two miles until you reach a place where there’s no light and the bare muddy sediment stretches away in every direction like a desert. That’s where you’ll find Ooze. Not that Ooze herself knows where she is, or that there could be anywhere else. Not that she knows she’s Ooze.
Ooze has no eyes or limbs, only a narrow body with a mouth at one end of it, an anus at the other and a spinal cord along its length. She is essentially a tube. Her brain is no more than a smallish swelling at one end of that spinal cord. She can’t think as we can. She can’t reflect or reason. But that doesn’t mean she can’t feel. She knows pain, she knows fear, she knows pleasure, and she experiences them all with no less intensity than we do. Or perhaps even with more, for Ooze has nothing to mediate her feelings. She can’t say to herself ‘This is just a feeling’ or ‘I feel this way now but it will soon pass.’ Feelings are all she has.
Ooze may have no eyes but she has senses. She tastes the water around her. She knows which way her body is oriented in relation to the sea bed, though she doesn’t know the thing below her is the sea bed, and doesn’t even conceive of herself as inhabiting a world separate from herself. She’s sensitive to even tiny fluctuations in the pressure of the water against her body, including the vibrations that we call sound. She can feel the touch of objects against her skin, and particularly against the nerve-rich ring that surrounds her jawless mouth. And she has another sense too, an electric sense – let’s call it tingle – which alerts her to the presence of other living creatures, including other individuals of her own kind.
She does not conceive of them as individuals, though, or as her own kind. To her they are tingly presences that make her furiously angry, either by intruding on her own patch of mud, or by being in her way when she chooses to move.
Ooze doesn’t conceive of herself as an individual either. To herself she is the entire universe, and, though I have spoken of her as ‘moving’, she doesn’t really experience herself to be moving as we’d understand it. For how can a universe move? Where could it move to? Ooze just knows that by wriggling her body in a certain way, she can pull new water and mud into existence in front of her and push old water and mud into nothingness behind her.
Ooze is always hungry, and she is always anxious. The two are closely related. She is the universe, and therefore immortal, so her fears are not centred on the possibility of ceasing to exist, but the function they serve is precisely that of keeping her alive. She fears all the time that she will find nothing to eat, however much mud and water she calls into being. And even when she finds food, her constant worry is that those tingly things that fight will appear out of nothing, as they sometimes do, and take it away from her.
There really is very little to eat in Ooze’s world. Nothing grows down there. Every source of nutrition comes from above and, unlike mud and water, it can’t be summoned towards her by wriggling movements of her body. It simply appears. As a matter of fact, though Ooze doesn’t know this, her food consists of corpses, sometimes whole, but more often in tiny fragments. Dead fish, dead seabirds, dead crustaceans, dead seals: they reach her after descending slowly through those two vertical miles of water. Often they have descended part-way and then become bloated up with gas and risen back towards the surface, only to descend once more when their guts burst open, or are breached by carrion eaters. All of them have passed through many different realms in their journey from the upper waters to the bottom of the abyss, and all have been gnawed, chewed and plucked at by the many creatures who wait for dead flesh at each different level from the sunlit surface to the sunless depths, just as Ooze herself waits down there at the bottom of everything. Each layer has its own particular specialists in the processing of dead meat.
By the time they come to rest in Ooze’s realm, the animal corpses have usually been torn to pieces. In most cases they reach her as tiny specks and motes: single fibres, individual bones, solitary scales and teeth, which may have been churning around in the eddies and currents of the middle levels for days or weeks or months. They’re too small to truly satisfy, but better than nothing at all, and nothing at all is pretty common too. Hungry and anxious, Ooze has often waited for weeks on end without the smallest scrap to eat. (Though of course she doesn’t know of days or weeks, for the only rhythms she experiences are her beating heart and her pulsing gills.) All she can do is wait, tasting the water as it passes through her gills, feeling the flux and tremble of it against her skin.