Once back from this trip, you will be moving out, finding a room, and Bob will be on his own again. Surely he knows this? It surely will not come as a surprise to him?
No point saying anything yet, since you have no particular idea where you will go. (Not far, if you can help it. There are rooms to let near the station, you could rent something there, though the noise bears thinking about, and the filth kicked up by the wagons, the soot.)
What will life be like, with you there (wherever ‘there’ turns out to be) and Bob here? You imagine meeting him in the station café, in the blue hour before his shift begins. You imagine buying him breakfast. You would like to do that, after years of him bringing your breakfast to you, one item at a time. (A foible of his. A joke, even. Something he picked up at the cinema. How food is served in grand houses. How the other half live.) Though if you’re going to buy him breakfast every day you had better get on looking for that job. A practice in Halifax might pay you something while you learn how to supervise the construction of kilns and presses and production lines. It will be a change from what you are used to. The profundities drilled into you at the Bartlett will not cut it here.
Bob is already clearing the plates. You stand to help him but he waves you back into your chair. He is smiling; you catch the shape of his mouth as he turns briefly through the light of the hearth. Not much of a smile: a rictus made of embarrassment and a desire not to speak. It took a while for you to understand this expression, which has become habitual.
It is to do with Jim, and the awkward transferred celebrity Bob has had to bear: father of a famous son. Bob’s smile acknowledges the good fortune that everyone imagines must be his lot: his fellows on the shop floor, the neighbours around him at the bar, the scarved wives nodding at him in the street. How proud he must be, with a son gone off to conquer outer space! Strange, given the enormity of that project – a quarter-mile-high spaceship raised on the shock wave of atomic explosions – how no one realises how afraid Bob must be.
You cross to the fire, reach under the bench and pull out your boots. A needless and heavy affectation, these, as you knew full well when you bought them, shortly after returning to the Riding. Steel toe and heeclass="underline" honestly, it’s not as though you’re lugging rebar about all day long. These heavy boots will mark you out in London. Is this the idea? That they should be your armour? Your constant, dragging reminder that life is changed, changed back, rewound? As you draw these thick laces tight, you find yourself wondering – bitterly, suddenly – if this is to be the pattern of your life: a series of tactical withdrawals.
Bob comes and sits beside you and draws his own boots out from under the bench.
‘You don’t—’ you begin.
He leans against you, gently, and maybe he is trying to communicate something to you. On the other hand, he could simply be toppling over while trying to get his boots on. Either way it doesn’t matter, don’t say anything, let him come with you to the station if he wants.
In silence, the pair of you pull on your coats. You lift the wire-mesh fireguard into place across the hearth; Bob unfastens the front door. Cold floods the room as surely as the vacuum of outer space floods an airlock, and the fire in the grate is all light and no heat, bidding you both a chemical farewell.
The porch step gives directly onto a narrow pavement.
The street, unlit, flows around you both, tugging you to the right, and down its little gradient to the great black flow of the main street, also unlit. You navigate by long practice, lifting heavy feet over the stones. The clopping of your boots suggests the passage of pit ponies.
Ahead, over rooftops and glimpsed between yard walls, pink towers of steam and dun smoke spill into the air. These inexpert washes colour the half-darkness, forcing in the idea of a new day.
The pavement is broader here, so that you and your dad may walk side by side. Bob links his arm with yours. It is an intimate and ordinary courtesy that the men of London long ago lost. (In Keighley, men hold hands.) Ahead of you, in a smutted sky without stars, one light hangs like a planet. For a moment, you think it might be Mars. Then a second, smaller light appears, a red light, blinking at the very edge of the white. Then, to the left, a steadier green light. You stare, mesmerised, as the white light’s red and green companions clarify themselves. They separate from their white parent and the central light grows oblate so that the planet is transformed, in an instant of perception, from a world into an artificial thing. The red and green lights move in a tilting orbit around the white light as the aircraft banks towards a distant airfield: first of the day and herald of the morning.
‘One from the Bund,’ says Bob, without bitterness.
You admire that. You wish your own heart did not pucker at the sight of that impossible, incomprehensible aeroplane. But it does. The stuff of the Bund feeds a resentment you have to acknowledge, if only to tell yourself, over and over, how shameful that resentment is. Does the horse resent its rider? Does the dog resent its master?
Sometimes. Perhaps. It has been known. And the speciations brought about by Gurwitsch’s ray are recent: little more than a generation old. The wounds are still sore and bloody where the human family has pulled itself apart into cognitive haves and have-nots.
You know what aeroplanes are. Obviously. As does your father, who has gone in his working life from chamfering the holes in the frames of ladies’ bicycles to checking the tolerances on pressure rings bound for rocketship propulsion systems in Woomera.
But these are crude mechanisms, set against the creations of the Bund. In a few short decades, the Bund’s minds have somehow fused engineering, architecture and design into an alchemical son et lumière that, at the touch of a secret button, transforms entire cities overnight. The Bund’s aeroplanes are not even planes any more. They have no wings. Or the whole plane is a wing. And even if that makes a kind of aeronautical sense, how is it possible that this same vehicle can plunge vertically, like a ball, then spread like a flower, disgorging its human cargo, not remotely discommoded, onto any square of even ground?
The aeroplanes you know are the aeroplanes your dad knows: rivet-and-sheet-metal concoctions, prayers to the Bernoulli principle, ungainly as storks. Dependent on runways. Dependent on air speed. Dependent on fuel. They are machines like the army airvan that carried Jim into the clouds over Croydon Airport, two Christmases ago. And how you all cheered that day (the last time you saw him; he’s not been back since), first Yorkshireman in space, kangarooing his way to Woomera by Tripoli, Cairo, Calcutta, Singapore!
This thing ahead of you, above you, wheeling around you, this red-green-and-white fairy galleon of aerogel and costly china, might have sprung from a different world. And if a world is only what we understand and handle and possess – then another world is precisely from where this thing has sprung.
‘One from the Bund.’
Like James’s shrug, the day you found your corn dolly on the moors, your father’s words leave you hanging at an uncomfortable angle to the world, as though everyone else knows some simple, small, obvious thing that only you have to puzzle over.
It ought to be your father seething with untutored resentment. It should be him shaking his gnarled and oily fist at the sky – ‘This sky no longer mine!’ – while you, with all your knowledge, all your education, all your experience (once the lover of a Bundist’s child), say nothing, for what is to be said? Perhaps a shrug, perhaps a smile.
Instead you scowl at the cobbles, feeling like an idiot – and this is bad, because from the Bund’s point of view, that is exactly what you are. Do you remember that card game you used to play with Fel? ‘Set’, it was called. Its cards were printed with different designs, each assembled from four pictorial components: one of three colours, one of three shapes, one of three fills, one of three numbers, maybe there were other components, you can’t remember, and you had to make tricks of three cards, all cards the same or all cards different in every component category, and just trying to rehearse the rules to yourself is itself a mental stair-climb, a breathless stagger-run to the very bounds of your cognitive capacity, but she never had that problem, did she? She could explain the rules to your friends in seconds. And she beat them, that goes without saying. She always won.