Someone barrelled into me from behind and I fell, dropping the phone.
I saw a bright trainer, a stylised skull stitched to the heel, and a hand snatching up the phone. I got to my feet. The young man leapt from the handrail of my walkway into the trough of the one moving parallel to mine, in the opposite direction. The combined speed of the walkways caused him to spin and tumble when he landed. He was already far behind me when he got to his feet. He was unhurt. He stood, arms folded, staring me down as he vanished in the fading light.
My heart hammered in my chest. Panic fizzed through me. But it was over and done and there was nothing I could do about it: I had been mugged. I don’t know whether it was the absurdity of the incident or what, but I felt strangely insulated from the assault. I was shaken, and stayed shaken a long while. At the same time, I found the incident impossible to take seriously. Here, in a place technologised to the point of incomprehension, someone wanted to steal a phone? Was this area haunted by unaccommodated criminals? Or was my assailant one of Chernoy’s patients, testing the limits of their regained youth? Exuberant. Out of control…
I should have run after him. I should have leapt from walkway to walkway and pursued him. But I had never been athletic, and I lacked the reflexes that make quick action possible.
So it occurred to me far too late that without the phone I wouldn’t be able to find my mother. And even as I thought this, the road, which had risen to cross water, met with a walkway, and the boards under my feet meshed and slowed.
I took metal stairs down to the waterside. There was a small river here: a well-domesticated suburban tributary of the Thames.
Along its banks were trees in full leaf, and leading away from the river, a peculiar, maze-like public park made of narrow gravel paths between hillocks no more than a few feet high. These must have been artificial. Between the hillocks, raised on wooden posts wrapped around with coloured scarves, were tents, marquees and gazebos of every size and shape. The tents were brightly coloured, lit by lamps that gave off a warm, organic glow. These lamps were hung from the tent posts, or placed upon the ground behind screens of ornate punctured tin. In each shelter lay a couch. Some tents held two couches, I suppose for partners who – not to be parted by death – had chosen to undergo the Chernoy Process together. And on each couch sprawled a living human form.
Some were naked. Others lay smothered in a thicket of metal branches which, growing up around their couch, threshed about, dipping in and out of that prone and defenceless flesh as if spooning it up.
My eyes fought to adjust, my mind to comprehend what I was seeing. The back-and-forth of metal blades as fine and sharp as grasses in the wind should have made those tents tableaux of violent atrocity. But as I walked, glimpsing each figure – here a man, there a woman, here two women, there a family gathered around a relative gone so to fat and out of true that it was not possible to guess the person’s sex – it came to me how happy everyone was here. How unconcerned. Around me rose a great contented murmur of calm and private conversation, which my ear, in passing, muddled to a giant, restful hive-hum.
The reclining figures, naked on their couches, watched my progress without embarrassment or self-consciousness of any kind.
Those whose bodies were hidden under thickets of threshing blades were hardly less passive. Their half-closed eyelids and small smiles suggested that they were drawing from the experience, and in full view of everyone, some small, innocent pleasure.
Here and there a figure, unattended at present, lay virtually hidden behind that sharp, weaving stuff. But I saw no blood, the blades dipped but did not appear to penetrate, and I began to wonder if that dangerous metal foliage was, after all, anything more than a sort of massaging mechanism.
I saw children – real children, not Chernoy’s Processed infants – by several of the couches, holding the hands of prone men and women who must, I supposed by their age, be their grandparents. Some were staring up in wonder at the faces of these ancient beings. Others, bored at last, were playing tag around the tents while their parents – who after all were only grown-up children themselves – kept vigil around the beds of their parents.
So many sensations and ideas pressed upon me all at once. It was only as I walked, snatching furtive glimpses, that I was able at last to parse what I was seeing. I was in a great tented gathering of the dying, where the naked dead-to-be held hands with the yet-living. The prone, plump, pinkish bodies on their couches never moved. Each tent was a tableau, warmly lit and calm. A series of nativities. The metaphor was an apt one, I saw now, for once the initial shock was past, I was able to register what was surely the point of the whole Process: every naked figure on its couch, young or old, man or woman, had a belly swollen with new life. Everyone lying here, regardless of their age or sex, was pregnant, and in dying they would, I supposed, give birth to themselves.
Standing lost in all that fertile dying, I knew then that I could not do what I had come to do. How could I presume to dissuade my mother from this new chance? What right had I to tell her she should die in the old world, she who had taken the decision to live in the new? Why had it even occurred to me to do this? Because I was afraid for her? Or because I was afraid of her, and what she would become?
The great warm human buzzing around me became a scent in the air, neither spring nor autumn, neither new life nor rot, but something else, something unprecedented, new to the Earth, which could not ever be the same again. I breathed it in and found myself, quite unaccountably, in tears.
I wondered how I would ever find my mother; and if I missed her, if I would see her before she was a child again.
Bob paid his only visit to Fel and me. He arrived late one Friday evening in June, right in the middle of my end-of-year exams, wandered goggle-eyed around our new apartment, and in the morning insisted that he go on his own to Ladywell to talk to Betty. And when he panicked, lost beyond all saving somewhere out in Woolwich (as had been inevitable), he rang, not me, but Stella, from a kindly stranger’s phone (‘I have a gentleman here says he’s lost, he says you’re his sister-in-law.’)
Stella put as brave a complexion on the afternoon as she could. But it was clear enough, once she had rescued Bob and led him to that place where Betty was at rest, dying and being reborn at once, that Bob would prove inadequate to the occasion.
I imagine him there, on the threshold of that tented fairy space, frightened and affronted. What on earth would he have found to say to his wife, in such surroundings, and after so long an estrangement?
Well, it turns out he did not enter. He never got that far. He stood on the travellator platform, talking to his wife on Stella’s picturephone. They cannot have been more than a couple of hundred yards apart.
It took me most of the summer to shake off my anger towards Stella. Eventually she managed to persuade me to break bread with her. Or at very least, fork cake, in the lobby of her usual hotel. She had decided to meet the controversy head-on, and insisted on playing me the recording of Bob’s conversation with Betty.
‘Stella,’ I protested, ‘it’s private. What were you thinking, recording this?’
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said, as oblivious as her boyfriend to old notions of personal privacy. ‘The phone records everything.’
I persuaded her to show me only snatches of Betty’s side of the conversation with her husband. Betty’s face, withered more by suffering than age, loomed large in the frame of Stella’s phone.
‘The thing about cancer,’ Betty said, ‘is that it hurts. So you learn to fold the pain up inside you. You crumple it up, so that, even as it gets stronger, it’s all the time getting tighter, denser, smaller, like a stone. And then you throw the stone away. You see? You throw it into the sea. And though the waves will return it, again and again, you throw it back into the water, again and again.