‘I don’t think I caught that.’
‘Yes you did. This publisher prints as many books as there are orders, which turns out to be under three hundred.’
‘Maybe you should try and write the kind of thing people will pay to read.’
Boswell placed the receiver with painfully controlled gentleness on the hook, then lifted it to redial. The distant bell had started to sound more like an alarm to him when it was interrupted. ‘Quentin Sedgwick.’
‘And Torin Bergman.’
‘Jack.’
‘As one fictioneer to another, are you Ferdy Thorn as well?’
Sedgwick attempted a laugh, but it didn’t lighten his tone much. ‘Germaine Gossett too, if you must know.’
‘So you’re nearly all of Cassandra Press.’
‘Not any longer.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Out,’ Sedgwick said with gloomy humour. ‘I am. The girls had all the money, and now they’ve seen our sales figures they’ve gone off to set up a gay romance publisher.’
‘What lets them do that?’ Boswell heard himself protest.
‘Trust.’
Boswell could have made plenty of that, but was able to say merely ‘So my books...’
‘Must be somewhere in the future. Don’t be more of a pessimist than you have to be, Jack. If I manage to revive Cassandra you know you’ll be the first writer I’m in touch with,’ Sedgwick said, and had the grace to leave close to a minute’s silence unbroken before ringing off. Boswell had no sense of how much the receiver weighed as he lowered it, no sense of anything except some rearrangement that was aching to occur inside his head. He had to know why the news about Cassandra Press felt like a completion so imminent the throbbing of light all but blinded him.
* * * *
It came to him in the night, slowly. He had been unable to develop the new story because he’d understood instinctively there wasn’t one. His sense of the future was sounder than ever: he’d foreseen the collapse of Cassandra Press without admitting it to himself. Ever since his last sight of the Aireys the point had been to save them - he simply hadn’t understood how. Living together would only have delayed their fate. He’d needed time to interpret his vision of the shadows on the wall.
He was sure the light in the house was swifter and more intense than dawn used to be. He pushed himself away from the desk and worked aches out of his body before making his way to the bathroom. All the actions he performed there felt like stages of a purifying ritual. In the mid-morning sunlight the phone on his desk looked close to bursting into flame. He winced at the heat of it before, having grown cool in his hand, it ventured to mutter, ‘Hello?’
‘Good morning.’
‘Dad? You sound happier. Are you?’
‘As never. Is everyone up? Can we meet?’
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘I want to fix an idea I had last time we met. I’ll bring a camera if you can all meet me in the same place in let’s say half an hour.’
‘We could except we haven’t got a car.’
‘Take a cab. I’ll reimburse you. It’ll be worth it, I promise.’
He was on his way almost as soon as he rang off. Tenements reared above his solitary march, but couldn’t hinder the sun in its climb towards unbearable brightness. He watched his shadow shrink in front of him like a stain on the dusty littered concrete, and heard footsteps attempting stealth not too far behind him. Someone must have seen the camera slung from his neck. A backwards glance as he crossed a deserted potholed junction showed him a youth as thin as a puppet, who halted twitching until Boswell turned away, then came after him.
A taxi sped past Boswell as he reached the street he was bound for. The Aireys were in front of the wall, close to the sooty smudge like a lingering shadow that was the only trace of their car. Gemima clung to her mother’s hand while Rod stood a little apart, one fist in his hip pocket. They looked posed and uncertain why. Before anything had time to change, Boswell held up his palm to keep them still and confronted the youth who was swaggering towards him while attempting to seem aimless. Boswell lifted the camera strap over his tingling scalp. ‘Will you take us?’ he said.
The youth faltered barely long enough to conceal an incredulous grin. He hung the camera on himself and snapped the carrying case open as Boswell moved into position, hand outstretched towards the Aireys. ‘Use the flash,’ Boswell said, suddenly afraid that otherwise there would be no shadows under the sun at the zenith - that the future might let him down after all. He’d hardly spoken when the flash went off, almost blinding its subjects to the spectacle of the youth fleeing with the camera.
Boswell had predicted this, and even that Gemima would step out a pace from beside her mother. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured, unbuttoning his jacket, ‘there’s no film in it,’ and passed the gun across himself into the hand that had been waiting to be filled. Gemima was first, then April, and Rod took just another second. Boswell’s peace deepened threefold as peace came to them. Nevertheless he preferred not to look at their faces as he arranged them against the bricks. He had only seen shadows before, after all.
Though the youth had vanished, they were being watched. Perhaps now the world could see the future Boswell had always seen. He clawed chunks out of the wall until wedging his arm into the gap supported him. He heard sirens beginning to howl, and wondered if the war had started. ‘The end,’ he said as best he could for the metal in his mouth. The last thing he saw was an explosion of brightness so intense he was sure it was printing their shadows on the bricks for as long as the wall stood. He even thought he smelled how green it would grow to be.
All For Sale (2001)
Once they were outside the Mediterranean Nights Barry could hear the girl's every word, starting with 'What were you trying to tell me about a plane?'
'Just I, you know, noticed you on it.'
'As I said if you heard, I saw you.'
'I know. I mean, I did hear, just about.' While he gazed at rather than into her dark moonlit eyes that might be glinting with eagerness for him to risk more, he made himself blurt 'I hoped I'd see you again.'
'Well, now you have.' She raised her small face an inch closer to his and formed her pink lips into a prominent smile he couldn't quite take as an invitation to a kiss. Not long after his silence grew intolerable, unrelieved by the hushing of the waves that failed to distract him from the way the huge blurred scarcely muffled rhythm of the disco seemed determined to keep his heartbeat up to speed, she said 'So you're called Baz.'
'That's only what my friends call me, the guys I was with, I mean. I don't know if you saw them on the plane as well.'
'I told you, I saw you.'
Her gentle emphasis on the last word encouraged him to admit 'I'm Barry really.'
'Hello, Barry really,' she said and held out a hand. 'I'm Janet.'
He wiped his hand on his trousers, but they were as clammy from dancing. Her grasp proved to be cool and firm. 'So are you staying as long as us?' she said, having let go of him.
'Two weeks. It's our first time abroad.'
'There must be worse places to get experience,' she said and caught most of a yawn behind her hand as she stretched, pointing her breasts at him through her short thin black dress. 'Well, I'm danced out. This girl's for bed.'
He could think of plenty of responses, but none he dared utter. He was turning his attention to the jittering of neon on the water when Janet said 'You could walk me back if you liked.'
As her escort, should he take her hand or at least her arm or even slip his around her slim waist? He didn't feel confident enough along the seafront, where the signs of the clubs turned the faces of the noisy crowds outside into lurid unstable carnival masks. 'We're up here,' Janet eventually said.