Ingels glanced out of the window. Offices flashed past, glazed displays of figures at desks, the abrupt flight of perspective down alleys with a shock like a fall in a dream, more displays. The offices thinned out and aged as the bus gathered speed towards the edge of Brichester. Nearly there, Ingels thought, then realised with a leap from his seat that he’d passed the Herald building three stops back. For a second he knew where he’d been heading. So what? he thought savagely, the rims of his eyes rusty and burning, as he clattered downstairs. But once he was on the street he wished that he’d thought to remember: now he couldn’t imagine where he could have been going in that direction.
BRICHESTER HERALD: BRICHESTER’S EVENING VOICE. The iron poem (two-thirds of a haiku, he’d thought until he grew used to it) clung to the bricks above him. The foyer was quiet. He wondered how long it would be before the presses began to thump heartily, disproving the soundproofing. Not long, and he had to write his column.
His mind felt flat and empty as the elevator. He drifted numbly through the hundred-yard open-plan office, past the glancing heads behind glass personalised in plastic. Some looked away quickly, some stared, some smiled. My God, I don’t even know his name, Ingels thought of several. “Hello, Moira,” he said. “How’s it going, Bert.” Telephones shrilled, were answered, their calls leapt prankishly across the floor. Reporters sidestepped through the aisles. Smells of deodorant and sweat, tang of ink, brandished paper, scurrying typewriters, hasty agitated conferences.
Bert had been following him to his desk. “Don’t wait for your personal bulletin,” Bert said, throwing a telex sheet on the desk. “The latest on your wandering planet.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve convinced you at last.”
“No chance,” Bert said, retreating. “Just so you don’t start turning the place upside down for it.”
Ingels read the sheet, thinking: I could have told them this six months ago. The Americans had admitted that an unmanned probe was well on its way to photograph the wanderer. He rested his elbow on the desk and covered his eyes. Against the restless patches of light he almost glimpsed what he’d dreamed. He started, bewildered; the noise of the newspaper poured into him. Enough, he thought, sorting out his notes.
He typed the television review—a good play from Birmingham, when are we going to see a studio in Brichester—and passed it to Bert. Then he pawed desultorily at the day’s accumulation on his desk. Must go and see my folks this week. Might drain my tension a little. He turned over a brown envelope. A press ticket, elaborately pretty lettering: exhibition of associational painting—the new primitivism and surrealism. Ug, he thought, and whatever you say to surrealists. Private view this afternoon. Which means now. “You can have a local arts review tomorrow,” he said, showing the ticket to Bert, and went out.
Once out of the building his mind teetered like a dislocated compass. Again the sky seemed brittle glass, ready to crack, and when he moved to shake off the obsession he found himself urged towards the edge of Brichester. A woman flinched from him as he snarled himself to a halt. “Sorry,” he called after her. Whatever’s in that direction, it isn’t the show I’ve been invited to. But there must be something there. Maybe I went there when I was young. Have a look when I can. Before I sleepwalk there.
Although he could have taken a bus into Lower Brichester, where the exhibition was, he walked. Clear my head, perhaps, if I don’t get high on petrol first. The sky was thin and blue; nothing more, now. He swung his briefcase. Haven’t heard of these artists before. Who knows, they could be good.
He hadn’t been through Lower Brichester for months, and was taken aback by its dereliction. Dogs scrabbled clattering in gouged shop-fronts, an uprooted streetlamp lay across a road, humped earth was scattered with disembowelled mattresses, their entrails fluttering feebly. He passed houses where one window was blinded with brick, the next still open and filmy with a drooping curtain. He examined his ticket. Believe it or not, I’m on the right track.
Soon whole streets were derelict. There was nothing but Ingels, the gaping houses and uneven pavements, the discreet sky, his footsteps alone; the rush of the city was subdued, quiescent. The houses went by, shoulder to shoulder, ribs open to the sky, red-brick fronts revealing their jumble of shattered walls and staircases. Ingels felt a lurking sympathy for the area in its abandonment, its indifference to time. He slowed down, strolling. Let myself go a bit. The private view’s open for hours yet. Relax. He did, and felt an irrational impulse pleading with him.
And why not, he thought. He glanced about: nobody. Then he began to lope through the deserted streets, arms hanging, fingers almost touching the road. Unga bunga, he thought. One way to prepare myself for the primitives, I suppose.
He found his behaviour touched a memory; perhaps the memory was its source. A figure running crouched through ruins, somewhere nearby. A kind of proof of virility. But they hadn’t been deserted city streets, he thought, loping. Just flat blocks of black rock in which square windows gaped. Abandoned long before but hardly affected by time. A figure running along a narrow path through the stone, not looking at the windows.
Clouds were creeping into the sky; darkness was suffusing the streets around him. Ingels ran, not looking at the houses, allowing them to merge with the memory they touched. It was coming clearer. You had to run all the way along one of the stone paths. Any path at all, for there were no intersections, just a straight unbroken run. You had to run fast, before something within the windows became aware of you, rather as a carnivorous plant becomes aware of a fly. The last part of the run was the worst, because you knew that at any moment something would appear in all the windows at once: things that, although they had mouths, were not faces—
Ingels stumbled wildly as he halted, glaring up at the empty windows of the houses. What on earth was that? he thought distractedly. Like one of those dreams I used to have, the ones that were so vivid. Of course, that’s what it must have been. These streets reminded me of one of them. Though the memory felt much older, somehow. From the womb, no doubt, he shouted angrily at his pounding heart.
When he reached the exhibition he walked straight past it. Returning, he peered at the address on the ticket. My God, this is it. Two of a street of dingy but tenanted terraced houses had been run together; on the front door of one, in lettering he’d taken for graffiti, were the words LOWER BRICHESTER ARTS LAB. He recalled how, when it had opened last year, the invitations to the opening had arrived two days later. The project he’d described after a hurried telephone interview hadn’t looked at all like this. Oh well, he thought, and went in.
In the hall, by the reception desk, two clowns were crawling about with children on their backs. One of the children ran behind the desk and gazed up at Ingels. “Do you know where the exhibition is?” he said. “Up your arse,” she said, giggling. “First floor up,” said one of the clowns, who Ingels now realised was a made-up local poet, and chased the children into a playroom full of inflatables.
The first floor was a maze of plywood partitions in metal frames. On the partitions hung paintings and sketches. As Ingels entered, half a dozen people converged on him, all the artists save one, who was trying to relight a refractory cone of incense. Feeling outnumbered, Ingels wished he’d made it to the maze. “You’ve just missed the guy from Radio Brichester,” one said. “Are you going to talk to all of us, like him?” another asked. “Do you like modern art?” “Do you want coffee?”