The froth, meanwhile, floating free of the ship, has formed lines, and these lines, like trails of spittle, like spawn, lead away from the ship; they are being pulled away from the ship, and it comes to him, in his strange, somnolent, undying calm, that this soft white stuff, these little beads strung on strings like fish eggs in a deep black stream, these bright things, these bubbles, are the crew.
He cries out, and hears his cry, and hearing it, the madness of it, the act of hearing in a vacuum that must by now have killed him, makes him scream the more, and since screaming is not enough, his hands begin to paddle, he scrabbles for purchase in the dark, and his left hand, the hurt hand, the bruised hand, catches against a film, an unseeable skin, and sticks there. Pain wells under his bruised and loosened fingernail and makes his hand a ball of hurt, and his gaze, drawn to that hurt, fixes on his hand, stuck there in a clear glue. A plate of his ship, turning to catch the light, appears as a sheet of light beyond his hand, and where his hand is stuck, there in the dark, the sheet twists, warps as through a lens, and it comes to him that he is in a bubble, breathing, screaming, that he is embraced within an egg, and sensing this, his bruised hand closes around the tissue it touched, and crumples it, and everything before him stretches and bends, the ship turns into streams of light, and above him the Earth itself vanishes in an ovoid blur.
Reaching with his other hand, his right hand, he grabs a fistful of that tegument and pulls himself forward, and the gluey stuff surrounding him folds itself upon his face and, screaming, he sees the material fog against his breath.
He is inside an egg. His tongue touches tasteless plastic stuff and he bites, desperate to be free, desperate to be dead, and something tears somewhere. He hears the air whine out and his ears pop and he begins to spin, tipping back into the violence of the world, a star no longer, but a lonely and unburdened man, riding a broken, bucking bubble in the dark.
The whining stops. The spinning world slows and steadies. The wreckage reappears, terrible in its tidiness: a palletised assortment of aluminium plates and drums of wire.
Jim breathes, and hears his breath. The bubble has mended itself. He reaches out again with both hands, steadier now, mystified by this bubble, and his hands meet gluey walls. He presses the walls wider: the egg gives a little, and the view before him wobbles. He lets go, and the world, or what there is of it – raw materials in space, turning in the light of Earth – recovers its shape.
He paddles around his little cocoon. He faces the sun, whose blaring light should blind and burn him, only to find that this quarter of his world is browned out. The material of his egg is responding to the sun’s glare, protecting him.
He inverts himself, looking for an edge to his strange and sustaining prison. A door. A valve.
He sees another egg, and another man inside it. And below that another. And another. He stares, counting the stream of bubbles rising from the deep, each one holding a man or a woman. The man in the bubble nearest him has already seen him. He gesticulates wildly, mouth open against the wall of his egg. James, absurdly, waves.
The stream of bubbles weaves about, new bubbles coming visible then drifting into shadow. Beyond his own string, other strings grow nearer, all gathering together in a braid. We’re saved, he thinks, we’re being saved, and the thought, which should comfort him, only fills him with a deeper fear. Saved how? And by whom?
A skull’s knowing rictus presses against the plastic just below Jim’s nose, and as he cries out and bucks away, a second skull, armed like the first with hands clown-spread beneath its neck, seizes hold of his bubble, nudges the other, and makes eyes at its companion. And such eyes! James has never seen such eyes before: eyes like stumpy telescopes on the zooms of pocket cameras.
The skulls, appearing out of nowhere, adhere to the wall of his egg with long, spatulate fingers, human, yet threaded with black lines as though tattooed with a map of the vessels running beneath the skin. The skulls are not human, but they must have begun that way. Products of the Gurwitsch ray, is Jim’s hysterical guess. An extreme fulfilment of Gurwitsch’s promise to ‘sculpt organic forms at will’. Their eyes shoot in and out and their necks, geared in ways that are not human, wobble their skulls about in strange and simple patterns, and it comes to Jim that the skulls are having a great time. That they are happy with their lot. That they are singing.
Jim backs away. The space outside his bubble is full of skulls suddenly, crowded with skulls, some adult, some belonging to children, some foetal and hardly formed at all, and as they swarm about his bubble, latching on with their big clown hands like so many putti, it comes to him that he has had enough of this, that this is not a rescue, and he has had enough, more than enough. Pressing his face into the plastic wall, he hears their shanty, fudged and softened, through the gluey skin – ‘Weigh, hey and up she rises’ – and with a snarl of hate he lunges and bites and tears a great mouthful of egg wall free and spits it out and feels the air rush out and the cold rush in and his ears explode and he cannot hear his laughter.
The skulls, bug-eyed and concerned, sew up the rent with dextrous fingers and invisible thread.
He bites again. They poke him with their fingers. He fights them off. They shuffle in. The egg is shreds. He tears and tears. The cold is everywhere and his blood fizzes like champagne. But still from somewhere comes the air to let him fill his lungs, and the skulls sing lullabies to him and paddle his flesh with big clown hands and absolutely will not let him die.
9
I spent two more days in London, ‘clearing the flat’. I bought a rucksack and packed it with books and a few photographs. I left my drawing table behind, and ornaments I had bought for the flat at one time or another. Except for a denim jacket, I piled all my clothes into bin liners and carried them around to a nearby charity store. On the train, I treated myself to a sleeping compartment, and I was well rested by the time I reached the West Riding, at midday, not a week after I had left.
I wrote the whole adventure off as a mistake. I had let nostalgia creep up on me and I had got what I deserved. Fel was in the Smoke somewhere, very close, close enough to use the flat we had shared. She had a new life, a new lover, and she was at very least trying for a baby. She was living the life she had wanted and which I had not felt I could give her. I wondered if her boyfriend was unaccommodated, or a Bundist, like her. I had not stayed around to find out. I hadn’t called Georgy, or even Stella – and by not calling her, I even passed up the chance to see my mother. I had run away from a place and time that had no room for me now. Perhaps “run away” is too strong. My quick departure did not feel like cowardice.
I stopped wondering. (Who is she seeing? What is she doing? Is she happy? Does she think about me?) I packed it all away. Some decisions cannot be revisited, even in the imagination. I was – I had to be – done.